Songs of the Puget Sound

2.

Yesterday
hens carried their round flouncy bodies
up into the coup,
chittering and cooing their sunshine happiness.

Something then moved out of the blackberries.
Little gift of wildness,
a cup of warmth
in a baby's coat

content,
and hardly afraid.

The hens in bed told stories
soft so soft
to each other and the hidden moon.

So I sat on the porch of the hen house
glad songs welcoming ears,
and the rabbit,
no more than a few weeks old,
nibbled the tender grass.

There is a time at the end of the most perfect day,
when the sun has been your companion,
when the air lingers full of the first few days of summer,

when there could be no more perfection
and then comes a movement,
the brown innocence,
quicker beat of heart
so far from your own.

To rise up on tiny bones and wonder,
to grasp a green stalk
taller than your head,

with no hands. Yes, no hands.
And I imagine how small its ivory
grinding as the grass and seeds slip
down into that bit of darkness.

Imagine what may come later in the long night
of larger hungers. And I wonder if it lives in fear.
And if not is this called innocence.

The ears turn to gather from this way and that
a warning, yet the air is warm and heavy. Old moon
hasn't yet climbed into its fields of stars.

And the hens, fall silent.
I leave the seed eater as we have
both reached our satisfaction.

A day like that
one hardly knows
how to write about.

~~~

Into the Eye of God



Into the eye of God
you dive,
black white-tipped arrow,
forsaking the sky
and life
to grip more of it.
Flying in the realm of water
oh heavy boat,
mighty oars plunge forward.
You gauge the shortest distance.
Calculate the weight and struggle
in your talons.
The beach is a door
you enter half water/half air,
a dark figure in a dripping coat
grasping at the windows.
Half of you is an explosion,
a black bloom, your tail is the flower.
After that is the prayer time.
The wings come up and open.
Drawn across your parachutes
are navigational symbols,
the ancient text.
I wonder who reads it.
The warm light brushes off the weight
of your feathers.
You jump into the air
and the fish, by then gladly,
goes too.



dedicated with love to Dotty
April 22, 2012

Wild Things in the Night




The committee of roosters gathers
at my ankles, the night
drifts off like a loose horse.

In my ears the coyotes' laddered song
still lingers. Wild open throated.
A language not so strange
awakens the heart,

gleefully, from a simple dream.

I wake with the sun,
the field is empty.

I look down into the petal of my hand,
and in between the fingers,
one tuft of gold-gray fur remains.





c2011 T.L.Stokes (all rights reserved)

Japan/my double vision

I wake up with Japan
like a window before me.
Rain from our sky
hangs on the tree's
goblet limbs
captured and still.
The unconfused
and spacious air
in Seattle grows darker
and more gray.
We are joined by waves.

I wake up with Japan
rising before me
her patchwork timber and steel
layered so it blocks the sky
and now a string of rescuers
crisscross becoming smaller
and smaller in the dark artwork
of what is left.

I wake up with Japan
and the rest of the world
reach their hands out
groaning and we can't stop
speaking of the day the earth
broke,
and how the heart
of your island
feels heavier
as the days pass
like a weary sun
passing the frightened moon.

I wake up with Japan
as each day she opens her eyes
remembering this isn't a dream.
I am hungry for photographs
to bring me closer,
to bridge the water,
to stand closer,
to do something.

I am hungry to dig my hands
down deep and pull something alive
up, anything, anything at all.

I wake up with Japan
and see as if on transparent silk
two worlds, transposed one upon
the other.

And what I touch here
I touch there.

Thus I hold a part of her fissured earth
and greet compassion, pouring
like the endless waters,
the entire atmosphere
gathering around the blue sphere
tilting slightly off center,
spinning, spinning,

and this red pain in my heart
and yours begins to heal
what was flung open
and washed,

and surprisingly,
somehow meticulously
will sew every last
lost thread together.

I wake up with Japan
typing the song as it comes
to me. Sky deepens out the window
and thunder shouts
in her mysterious
tongues.





c2011 TLStokes/Floodwaterphotography (all rights reserved)