five minute poem/s

#5
The trees are bare again, after days
of warmer skies, tracks soften and
refreeze into rigid records of our

days spent slow-stepping along narrow
trails through the windbreak. Sign of
rabbit, pheasant, a scattered bouquet

of feathers from some small bird.
We gather. A pinecone, a fan
of juniper needles, bird nest

blown down from its crook;
the delicate dried mud
cracks open leaving no trace

of the place that
once held those brittle
bodies before they learned flight.




#7
Like some trick, the sharpness
of white sunlight on our sheets
as they move just a little

on the line, brings me
suddenly back
to my mother’s phone call
from the island this morning –
of her voice telling me the reefs

are suddenly dying; bleached pale
as bone. The sheets lap
like lazy currents, and I think

of your body suspended above
that water, of the lengths
of unbreathable
blue between us.


Aven fell asleep on the way back from the mailbox the other day...and I remembered her fallling asleep in the sled last year when she was still such a tiny baby, bundled like crazy, lying on her back as I pulled her over the snow...


#6
As much as the ragged silhouette
of the tobacco root mountains, or
the bleached fields with their easy sway

of wheat stubble, the wind is an element
of our view. Breath stealing pull
and twist of air, the land itself;

from lichen covered stone-face,
to the sudden, unexpected fold
of sheltered draw, sighs

around your bare face, pinks
your hands, makes you grateful to catch
a lungful
of such wide wild air.

* * *

We're preparing for Christmas, which I am actually ridiculously excited for...



As you can see, we're practicing peace...



except when it come to your little sister who want to play with your toy...