Apr 26
You might crush a dandylion
or daisies neither white nor red;
flower heads that float above the weeds,
or mayapples
swarming everywhere,
or just some ordinary
inconsequential
greenweeds;
lichens working at the crack,
a violet,
something butter gold,
or during their brief ascendency
more mayapples on the march.
Apr 26
You’d think a thousand shades of green
would be enough for all new leaves.
But some species will not begin that way
and some will never turn.
It’s a lifestyle choice,
from once upon a time.
Yet for leaves the brontosaurus gazed and grazed on,
gentle giant just last week recovered from oblivion,
green is good enough.
Apr 26
From the tenth and tallest floor of the St. Joseph tower,
through a narrow glass hard-glazed in cement,
looking west to the mountains across the northern edge
of the main Mission Campus
and down into the lots for the tonka cars and trucks,
the spring clouds sweep the distant peaks.
The days are long, the nights are longer;
food is the only fun, except not much.
Discharge, like the rapture, frees.
Under the wire of a fallen fence
rests a hunk of smoky quartz,
probably with emeralds or rubies in the matrix.
The main road up the mountain was blocked for months
when several trees pulled each other down
and the smashed tops smash-wove an impenetrable snarl.
It took a neighbor’s trackhoe’s loader to pull the knot apart
after all the trunks were cut.
But falling doesn’t mean wood’s work or use is done;
it becomes host to a host.
Shallow roots too near the branch shall be undercut
and rise to become fresh habitat:
law of the forest.
Still genuine American chestnut.
We got many boards from the fallen trees;
but forty years on, only crumbly chunks remain.
A couple days of rain, and the Little Sandy Mush Bald Branch
sends its forest-filtered fresh waters streaming down through Hot Springs
More and more it looks as if the ground
chews the old convenience from underneath.
Though grave diggers toil is long,
sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
they but thrust their buried men
back into the human mind again.
(says uncle William)
Apr 2
¡FREE BOOKS!
Two days to go: Sunday & Monday.
It is better to have and to have read then never to have done so.
Certainly you could argue with this, but would you respect yourself afterwards?
Try one book (or both) for FREE.
On Amazon.com (the covers are links), available only in Kindle format. If you haven’t got a Kindle Device, one will be ap-pointed for you, you can download the AP that will convert your phone or tablet or laptop or computer or toaster into a Kindle Reader which will give you access to all Kindle formatted titles (not just mine), and they are also FREE.
The Asheville Story.
The Williamsburg Story.
review snippets (good ones only)
Fit to Curve is a skillfully written mystery with complex characters and such a fascinating plot that I’m way behind on my chores.
This series is a favorite with interesting plots and wonderfully drawn characters. Wish the author would write more of them. The type of book you don’t want to end.
A bed and breakfast mystery. Super characters, well developed. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A mouth-watering, good read. Love the old lady with the sharp wit. I’d like the recipes, too.
The plot builds very slowly. But once I got into it, I was hooked. I liked the characters, and you get a lot of insight into them.
This is too fine a novel to be mired in the mystery/suspense ghetto. It’s a good mystery, with a complex plot, all the mystery trappings, but the characters are rounded and attractive. The theme seems to me to be a consideration of morality – not just sexual morality (or immorality), though there’s some of that too, for those who like to read such descriptions, but all kinds of morality: for how high a price might you sell your soul?
Heart Attack is a great read!
This couple are a great addition to the mystery genre. Sharp and interesting with a bit of humor and spice.
Snappy dialog. Geoff and Ellen are a great team. He has a definite intuitive method of assessing info and arriving at conclusions that baffle and irk his cohorts. Ellen is more conventional and together are a great team. Unusual mystery not easily solved.
COMING SOON:
The Charleston Story.
The Atlanta Story.
Every book published, or symphony premiered, every play that opens, lives or dies on its reviews. Sometimes a work survives a spate of initial bad reviews, or the reviews spur revisions that improve it. Sometimes a rerelease catches a better moment in the zeitgeist. And sometimes a piece thrives despite universally bad reviews. More commonly enough good notices bring life, enough bad ones bring death.
Internet reviews are the same. And different. Reviewers aren’t qualified or institutional. Just people who loved the book or hated the salmon-on-a-cedar-plank, who thought the treble was set too high or didn’t like the way the salesperson talked to her toddler. Good or bad, they’re up forever. A ten-year-old comment might still be on top of the list. Sometimes they generate a spiral, usually downwards, of challenges and replies.
People who use reviews learn to assess the credibility of reviewers and pick up on which ones their own tastes align with. And some sites help by letting you access all the reviews somebody has written or by tracking whether other people scored their comments “helpful.” A long string of 5-star reviews may mark an especially good piece of work. But it may also mean the author has lots of relatives trying to help her out. 1-stars may mean something’s lousy, or show enemies or rivals lurking. A 3-star average may indicate mediocrity or an excellence that not everybody gets.
But it’s all you have, if you’re looking for something new to read, or a new restaurant to try. Your time and money are limited, so you’ll probably check out the higher-rated choices first. Reviews are the blood flow of Amazon: either they bring you some oxygen or your work turns blue. The people behind the work take all the comments personally and feel them sharply. Reviews can validate your efforts or knock you flat. If you’ve spent a year of your life making the best story you know how, hearing “well, that sucked” is going to sting. Obviously an idiot with no taste, but …
I was lucky, right off the bat, getting strong reviews that pleased me not just because they were favorable, but because they seemed to understood what I was trying to do and thought I had succeeded. But then came some harsh ones, some mean ones. Some stung because they touched what I thought the weak spots were—ah, got me! Some annoyed because they claimed I had failed at something I hadn’t tired to do, or violated a standard I wasn’t trying to meet. Should you give a bad review to a book because it isn’t the kind of story you like to read? Most people let it go, but others are on a mission to purify the world by marking everything that displeases them.
What’s fascinating is when the same quality gets an opposite response. Fit to Curve, my first book, starts slowly as I introduce my main characters to the world, for the series, not just for this story. Part of the craft of the novelist is learning what you can leave out (and for the most part: if you can, you should). But this was my first venture. It was the most common criticism, except for the reviewers who didn’t notice, didn’t care, or thought it was a good thing. My second title, Heart Attack, moves more briskly; it generated a different set of complaints. Here’s a selection of typical comments (some fragments, some whole, mostly from Amazon, a couple from Goodreads). Question: have they read the same book(s)?
Fit to Curve is a skillfully written mystery with complex characters and such a fascinating plot that I’m way behind on my chores.
This series is a favorite with interesting plots and wonderfully drawn characters. Wish the author would write more of them. The type of book you don’t want to end.
A bed and breakfast mystery. Super characters, well developed. You are waiting for the other shoe to drop. A mouth-watering, good read. I love the old lady with the sharp wit and mind. I’d like the recipes, too
I wasn’t sure I’d like this book at first, because the plot builds very slowly. But once I got into it, I was hooked. I liked the characters, and you get a lot of insight into them.
Good mystery, likeable characters, but overly long-winded. I put it down for days on end because it just seemed to go nowhere at times.
This is too fine a novel, as a novel, to be mired in the mystery/suspense ghetto. It’s a good mystery, with a complex plot, all the mystery trappings, but the characters are rounded and attractive. The theme seems to me to be a consideration of morality – not just sexual morality (or immorality), though there’s some of that too, for those who like to read such descriptions, but all kinds of morality: for how high a price might you sell your soul?
It pains me to say I just couldn’t get into this book. I found the characters were well written, and their personalities drew me in. However, with that being said, the plot just moved too slow for me.
Heart Attack is a great read! Just wish Ellen & Geoffrey weren’t quite so perfect; never do anything wrong, look great all the time, have wonderful jobs, and the only drawback to their marriage … she can’t have kids.
This couple are a great addition to the mystery genre. Sharp and interesting with a bit of humor and spice.
Snappy dialog. Geoff and Ellen are a great team. He has a definite intuitive method of assessing info and arriving at conclusions that baffle and irk his cohorts. Ellen is more conventional and together are a great team. Unusual mystery not easily solved.
I just read the first few pages and then deleted it from my Kindle. I am not a fan of books with nothing but sex and innuendo for a story line. It might have gotten better as it went along, but I couldn’t get far enough to find out.
The last was my favorite 1-star, from Amazon Canada. It’s a little bewildering, I’m really not sure what alarmed her. But it brought a huge brief spike in Canadian sales. Probably also some disappointed readers.
So, hey, if you’ve got something nice to say, say it. If you’re going to be mean, pause a second: do you need to? Have you spotted a rotten thing the world should be warned against, or just something not to your taste?
That’s my review: 5-stars.
Yesterday, daffodils split the soft soil to rise and bloom and dangle golden.
Today, sudden, overnight, this has come.
The soft snow may insulate new shoots, even at 20°F.
Our March did come in lamb-like, promising an exit snow.
Nine inches piled on the railings, in the icy air.
But the ground, still warm, sucked the first six inches down.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, it is the day of the amaryllis, unfolding.
This salmon-pink giraffe, 35 inch stalk,
will open all the way tomorrow,
and the snow be gone.
Mar 9
Half the year we have leaves,
in Western North Carolina,
half the year we do not.
We’ve just about finished with the not part.
A week ago there was a chill hold.
Trees of wood, trees of shadow.
Projection on the ground, not real at all,
except everyday it’s closer to blooming.
Along Church Street, south-east forty miles, in Asheville,
an espalade of tree tops in perfect conic sections.
There are no leaves yet.
But the tip of every branch trembles
ready in silver or in gold.
Bloom, any minute now.
Any second.
Even the ever-cautions hornbeam is at the edge.
A few more minutes of sunlight in a day,
warmer by two or three degrees,
not just one trigger is cocked.
The whole hillside. Ready at the tips.
Doesn’t matter if you are ready.
Mar 9
Some fabric still on the loom,
still being made, pick by pick,
a plain weave with warp stripes.
Amaryllis expressing red
and a probably indecent proposition.
Dyed skeins drying in the sun.
Early stages of arousal.
Ejaculating, in slow motion.
From above, just beginning.
Cranking it up.
Boom!
Back to the red, from behind.
Under the snowy footsteps, springtide rumbles.
The amaryllis are beyond ready.
Really, they’ll start without you.
Beetles and microbes are all the company
that we shall have for our animal decomposition.
Fallen, rotting logs transform,
populated and adorned with lichens,
endlessly varied in shape and color
and texture, from delicate lacework
to the hard shelves that jut off trees.
The trees reveal more undressed’
as they shall stay for several weeks more,
the mountains and the sky.
And the line of little badges
that demark our new neighbor.
Somebody’s always got to be first,
no matter the risk,
so comes the crocus.
Another killing frost to come?
Of course.
But, hello, for today.
Leftovers under foot.
Step gently because it is all alive.
Even the rocks, digested by their dressings.
Quartz born in fire, resting on the loam.
Quartz born in fire, washed by the waters.
Feb 8
The first tomatoes last spring were a handful of cherries.
Then the season and the vines got serious
and five gallon buckets spilled out on to full-size cookie sheets.
By the middle of November,
the final fruits, two little bowls. The last tomatoes of 2014.
Only one month more now ’til spring,
ever new.
Feb 8
Nothing to lose, a brace of mysteries to win
Follow the links below.
Geoffrey and Ellen Fletcher live in Roanoke, Virginia, in the mountains north of town. Geoff is a poet who teaches creative writing at Hollins University and Roanoke College. Ellen is a free-lance travel writer, frequently published in TravelAmerica. Geoff goes with Ellen, when his schedule allows and she can persuade him to come. With an uncanny frequency they find themselves involved in murder investigations, often involving deaths not recognized as crimes.
Ellen is on assignment to Asheville, North Carolina, to do a follow-up for a story she wrote a year before. Geoff is reluctant to come with her until he learns his college girlfriend and new husband will be staying at the same bed-and-breakfast. Juniper House is packed with interesting characters and Geoff decides to enjoy Asheville and his unintended vacation.
But when two of their fellow guests die, and the police see only accidents, they realize they’re on their own if they want to solve the killings before there are more victims, before they become victims themselves.
Ellen’s trip to Colonial Williamsburg gets complicated. She’s researching an article about the people who work behind the scenes. But somebody is making things difficult for those people, with incidents that are at first just puzzling, then malicious, then seriously nasty. The local police and the administrators of the Historical Area and of William and Mary College can’t even agree on whether the events are connected, let alone what they should do.
Ellen’s daily updates alarm Geoff and he gets a friend to cover final exams so he can ride down to join her. During the two days it takes him to bicycle from Roanoke to Williamsburg, the provocations take on an ever nastier character. He may be too late to turn things around.
I can’t let go of this image of North Carolina November sky.
Clean as a pantone chip.
Also the precise shade of existential terror
wherever in the world our raptor drones are hovering
for all the tiny humans living underneath.
Note the separate venting of the room and the under-works.
No longer visible: the electrical connection
that fed the reading light and the heat lamp.
The list is not from a flawed chamber structure,
but from the shape of the hole below.
A backhoe is so much faster than pick and shovel,
a few minutes instead of half a day,
but far less precise with edges.
The foot of snow that landed Saturday last,
collapsed in one day into the still-warm soil
and melted over the roof edge, from the sun above, gas heat below,
its escape arrested temporarily in the still-freezing air.
The changes from decades of slow decay, the changes overnight,
are mocked by an image of empyrian lucidity
that clouds can cover in an hour,
no longer perfect but neither so frightful as before.
Nov 1
Overnight it grew, as the cold and moisture met.
We were warned — and advised and a-watched and alerted.
No more flowers, no more tomatoes. First hard freeze, also.
But the leaves are not quite done.
Some have shook and shed and they break the whiteout with splashes of yellow, pink, and rust.
Leaves wink from their branches.
And thousands lie scattered across the top of the snow,
in rebellion,
not pressed under,
promising some measure of autumnal rennaisance,
tomorrow or the next day.
Still only .00000099 a word.
Geoffrey and Ellen Fletcher live in Roanoke, Virginia, in the mountains north of town. Geoff is a poet who teaches creative writing at Hollins University and Roanoke College. Ellen is a free-lance travel writer, frequently published in TravelAmerica. Geoff goes with Ellen, when his schedule allows and she can persuade him to come. With an uncanny frequency they find themselves involved in murder investigations, often involving deaths not recognized as crimes.
Ellen’s on assignment to Asheville, North Carolina, to do a follow-up for a story she wrote a year before. Geoff is reluctant to come with her until he learns his college girlfriend and new husband will be staying at the same bed-and-breakfast. Juniper House is packed with interesting characters and Geoff decides to enjoy Asheville and his unintended vacation.
But when two of their fellow guests die, and the police see only accidents, they realize they’re on their own if they want to solve the killings before there are more victims, before they become victims themselves.
Ellen’s trip to Colonial Williamsburg gets complicated. She’s researching an article about the people who work behind the scenes. But somebody is making things difficult for those people, with incidents that are at first just puzzling, then malicious, then seriously nasty. The local police and the administrators of the Historical Area and of William and Mary College can’t even agree on whether the events are connected, let alone what they should do.
Ellen’s daily updates alarm Geoff and he gets a friend to cover final exams so he can ride down to join her. During the two days it takes him to bicycle from Roanoke to Williamsburg, the provocations take on an ever nastier character. He may be too late to turn things around.
The first hard frost is the real end, and that could be weeks.
But all the flowering plants prepare their final bursts.
Many are done already, a few will hang on until their petals freeze.
The chimley rose saved the best for last.
Since staked up, a mowing near fatality.
No more blooms to come, but we’re going out grand.
Will even a frost take down the lemony mint from its summer-long peak?
But the gatekeeper of the herb garden does not care about seasons.
A hunk of cloudy quartz shares some faces with other entities
but marks the gatepost without concern for any of us.
Nor rain nor sleet nor hail — never mind, it’s quite all right.
I’ll just stand here and watch y’all wilt and wither one more time.
This isn’t a book shelf, of course it’s not.
But can you lichen it to one,
and picture little volumes, bound in bark, printed with gall ink,
fanned around the oak tree trunk?
Well, if you managed that, we’re past the stressful part.
Every three months Kindle Direct Publishing allows its authors a chance
to promote books by giving them away.
And that time for me has rolled around again.
The next five days: October 3-7, 2014
Friday through Tuesday
the Kindle e-book versions of
Fit to Curve and Heart Attack
can be downloaded for free.
If you don’t have a Kindle Device
there is a free Kindle Ap available for your computer, your tablet, your phone
or your microwave oven (all the recent models, anyway, the ones that can charge i-phones).
So, if you’re a mystery reader
you might enjoy meeting Geoffrey and Ellen in their first two adventures.
Direct links:
Nothing to lose, at this price, and a world to win.
The Asheville Story — The Williamsburg Story
This promotion is Amazon planet wide,
not just the United States,
so come Canada, come Britain, come France,
Germany, Italy, Spain,
India, Japan, Mexico, Brazil.
Oops! And Australia. Maybe I got this in before they noticed.
Which way does the sun go?
Italy is my last untouched market,
somewhere from six to six thousand in the others.
The Ellen and Geoffrey Fletcher Mysteries are of a cozy character but written for adults.
KDT, Kindle Daylight Time, seems to track with PDT, Pacific Daylight Time,
3-4 hours from now (time of post).
Sep 22
Fall’s upon us,
laid that maple low.
As the sugars rise and flow
and assign each leaf its brilliance,
it’s time for the changes.
After two full years without a cat,
we broke our fast with Lilly, five years old,
rescued from a cross-country move.
Oh, she holds down a lap, chases a laser, meows a little,
but showed no interesting quirks of character.
Until the other night.
We’re rethinking.
Max, four German Shepherds back, used to bite water.
Had a few kittens who flirted with the shower drain.
Never had a cat who sits in running water.
Be ready to take it and run when you tell the universe:
surprise me!
Sep 22
Some emergent mushrooms are pulled up by the moon.
Some by the sun.
Or Mars.
By Venus.
Or by an Angel.
Some tough and chewy, grapple on for the long run.
Some are social, aligned like the seats in the balcony.
Curtain rising, caught between my shadow and the sun.
Death comes, from Pluto, in the end.
But the flies and beetles and the microbes settled in for a week of feasting.
Up for a while, down for a while,
before long, up again.
Transformed, not ever ended.
Sep 22
Rocks are not alive; probably this is true.
But life surrounds them on a living planet,
covers them, colors them, ever so slowly digests them.
Even the crystals, all edges, vertices, flat faces.
What gives quartz its accuracy as a time keeper?
Not patience alone.
Like some people, some rocks
you’ve got to scrape hard or crack apart to find what’s inside.
The tree has been working here forty or fifty years.
But what exactly is the exchange between these roots and these rocks?
Surrounded since the beginning of the tree, or did they find a way to insinuate themselves?
Were they helped? By some necessarily quite short entity sharing the space inside?
Y’all stay with us, now.
Sep 8
A little dirt, a little water, processed through a bulb: an emblem perfect on a stem.
Lower, where the tree trunk reaches into the earth, a golden dirt bloom.
Lichen shelves, ascending fairie ladder.
Puff. Ball. Woodland antiseptic.
Either the rock grows larger, using it’s fungal affiliates as we use our microbioma.
Or the branch wears away the bottom while the lichens eat the top.
The plastered leaf may stay, may wash away downstream.
Camera clicks convert the eddies to shining mirror rock, solid for the instant.
Zooming out, the flow of the branch,
gentle today, going forever down.
The mighty Mississippi waits, assured of what’s coming,
moves all its other work along and waits
as the Little Bald Branch runs into Spring Creek
down to the Pigeon River, down to the French Broad
pausing for the turbines at Lake Douglas, over the TVA spillway
at last to meet the Mississippi
riding down some more to New Orleans
into the Gulf of Mexico, tickling the frenulum of Florida
as it exits into the Atlantic
and sails the Gulf Stream north to the coast of Wales.
That’s it? Or sucked next under arctic ice,
pulled across and down into the deep currents of the Pacific?
Yeah, probably that.
Water like electrons will always go to ground.
The cycle unbroken.
Pacing while the internets whirl.
It probably isn’t a good thing that the turkeys let me get this close.
They should flee what I might be.
Two hens and a half-pint.
One hot bush, from the little chilies on the bottom to the thirty jalapenos above.
Wait, that’s two bushes in one cage.
Peppertunity.
Be happy that you’re happy.
Everybody must get glad.
A sucking bee
just like a spelling bee, except stickier.
Just being available.
The dense wood in the middle was the base of a butterfly bush that stood eight feet tall.
Last year.
This year, the final frost killed it all, except two tiny sprigs.
Just a flutter by bush, this year.
After awhile, you don’t see this,
because it would be too weird, if you had to explain.
It is something, really.
We’ll die, we will, but it won’t be this pretty.
Death be proud.
They come, to astound, and then to die.
Hear me roar.
Yes, the super moon, two weeks ago.
The camera didn’t know how big it was.
Supper moon?
Any bigger and it would be falling,
a spiral exploding death by gravity.
148,000 words, no, you’ve got to be kidding?
Please, ma’am, Ghost Walk is a story that long,
really, it is.
I have already eschewed surplussage.
They all promise to reply,
unless they don’t.
That’s a “no.”
So say “no” to death,
to go back into the human mind again.
ecce
third book in the series
of the Ellen and Geoffrey Fletcher Mysteries
Well. The last improper comma is gone, the last proper but absent comma is inserted.
Of a thousand proposed edits, all but a few score taken.
The big question now: do I trigger some dozens of rejections
from a flurry of query letters to my list of literary agents
in hopes of a single positive reply?
Or just upload to Amazon, like the first two,
for a few minutes of being the newest mystery in the world?
Well, not tonight.
The edit heave is hove.
Bed beckons.
Cover
All over the bush, on every branch, hundreds of these.
Sharon’s rose.
Worker bee on a sticky shaft.
Bootstraps of a bee.
Exquisite workmanship at every bloom. She outdoes herself.
The thrust of it.
The blooms of dill are lovely in life,
are changed but, in death, undiminished.
Dill and gone.
Smile at the sun smiling,
and filter every ugly thing.
Life star terrestrial.
Pure love, immutable, golden.
Yellow rose represents.
Tabled motion in the parliament of flowers.
Beauty arranged.
Above the orchard about a hundred yards, history barks a lesson.
The big trunk was a chestnut brought down by blight.
The little trunk was second growth, brought low by blight’s grandson.
Blight too shall pass.
Chestnut, not spreading.
Nothing beside remains.
Hunks of trunk at the root.
All the branches have become brush
after a hundred seasons of blossom and fruit.
Alas, poor York!
A little sadness for the loss of shade and loss of keeper apples,
and loss of the bird staging arena of limbs and twigs.
But a hundred-year reign is a fruit-tree jubilee.
Blessed be.
We wondered, when we first walked the trails here below the Little Sandy Bald,
if the blocks of quartz we saw every three or four steps,
pebble size to boulder size, clear and rosy and cloudy,
held rubies or emeralds inside,
or sapphires, the fancy forms of quartz.
Walking on jewels; we still are.
Quartz with veins.
Most fungal entities are brief,
pop through the soil for a week
then begin immediately to decay.
Lichen shelf.
But some harden and settle in for the long term.
And become habitats themselves.
New variety.
90º around the trunk,
slipped sidewards in time
comes a fresh beginning.
Ooze of birth.
The Jain swish the path before their steps
to insure they don’t crush a bug.
I’m less moved by bugs, but hate to find I’ve crushed one of these.
Just looks phallic.
Or a family of these.
Loam cardinals.
Or even one of these.
Just one.
Not this.
Member of extended family.
Not these.
Spore bomb.
Or this one.
Just one of these, a hole to breathe or blow.
The parent organisms live underground,
safe from my steps,
busy being the synapses between tree roots
powering the internet of trees.
Really: this is fresh-made science.
Be thankful God does not spend all his time deciding softball games
and litigating kidney stones.
This is a file picture because our Hairy won’t hold still for an at-work shot.
He’s a very guilty bird and explodes away at any human sight or sound.
But, I can’t imagine how he hears or sees at all when he’s hammering at the hemlock.
Eating at our house.
The core of the house was a hundred years old when we moved in, 1976.
It’s not finished yet, but by the end of 1978 Dan carved a declaration.
The main inside layout, at least, was done.
1978.
We have all the woodpeckers on call: the little Downy, the huge Pileated.
Any of them might peck a little, one time or another, grooming our sheathing.
Hairy is Robin sized.
Wood-boring bees, carpenter bees, bumble bees — drill nests.
Perfect augured circles go square in, then turn at the bottom.
Larvae of next year’s bees are deposited just past the crook.
Hairy is on a mission.
Just as many perfect 13/16 inch borer borings as we have,
that many will he get to the bottom of.
He is not as neat a worker as the bees.
Penetration.
Not quite through the hemlock rafter, two inches literal, but more than halfway.
There probably isn’t any chance of structure-threatening injury to the house.
But we’d begun to think the apple tree
already old and damaged when we landed here
that it could stand forever.
Sergeant York.
Until one mid-October morning, last year, it fell.
The props too light, the crop too heavy, too much rain.
This spring it made some leaves and blossoms, taking a few more months to die.
Site of new tree, as yet undermined.
Last week, the chainsaw finally fixed, it’s all gone to the brush pile
(0ne of a hundred of brush piles).
Time for a new tree, the birds are insistent, and the porch needs shade.
Unless the whole blended lesson is that we’ve had our season.
The big wheel has been turned enough by all the little wheels
and our time’s up.
Last call for drinks.
Before color photography, this is how flowers looked.
Before colors.
I’m glad to live in the days of color.
Great gladness.
Even with tans and grays we can distinguish a thousands shade, so many more than fifty.
Millions is still better fun, eyeball ice cream.
Nearer my glad.
Reds and yellows.
Golden rose.
Love these fellows.
True colors.
What is the opposite of butter?
Inverse?
And gray is the new green?
Contrapositive.
I think some camera control options are meant to be left alone.
Pink, after.
No. That’s scary. My tool box is red and it’s bright sun outside.
A writer`s toolbox.
Ah, outside. Much better. Sunshine and flowers.
Liatris.
And clutching and clambering about the blossoms, the big speckled butterfly does his business.
Swallowtail at work.
From the top, with a blue streak up the middle.
It’s pollination all day long, from the flower’s point of view.
Swallowtail, the dark side.
The bees are also leaving footprints everywhere.
But they’re not feeding, they’re collecting.
Bees knees.
And this lady better head home while she can still fly.
Pollen sacs are filling fast.
Saddle bags.
Not a camera trick: the green leaf is red when the sun shoots through.
Opaque green/gray when top lit.
Red through.
How we rock, when there have been too many colors to contemplate.
Rocking corner.
Or back indoors, on the other side of the one-way mirror.
The witness has self-interrogated, -charged, -convicted.
Sentence pending.
Inside the grand circle of mountain ridges, inside the circle of trees that ring the grass, an abundance of pretty little things.
Beneath the ironwood tree, a fungal family up-reach through the ivy.
Marching order.
But at each center of the tanish, beigeish disks, a spot of blue.
Blue, why blue?
Our snake this week was a third the length, a quarter the girth, a fiftieth the mass of last week’s blacksnake.
A little garter garden guarder.
Two foot of pure, well, snake.
Looking both ways, tongue forked and flicking, smelling me.
Forked tongue tiny.
Between the snake and the tomatoes a pile of brush.
What’s not to lich?
Digesting slowly.
Glad to be coral, in full rut; as shameless, if a bit more delicate, than a baboon’s butt.
Gladolia, hereabouts.
Garden guarders, like the garter, may be verygolds.
Don’t stare directly at the fractals.
So nearly stepped on, just inside the kitchen door, a chevron,
an inch and a quarter, weirdly well drafted.
Joan of Arc’s shield?
Not impressive as a flyer, kind of a stumble flutter.
Fearless symmetry.
But eclipses my poor powers.
A tortoise can stretch it out, when life depends; but a snail not so much.
Maybe the head of the mushroom grows faster than the snail can run, but how shall she dismount?
Ticket to ride.
Six feet of blacksnake in the grass points to the tree with six bird feeders.
Can he unhinge his jaw enough to swallow a gold finch or a nuthatch?
We used to see whole eggs along the gullet every time we’d relocate the guy half a mile away
who’d returned to rob our chicken coop again.
It took a week to digest his dinner and crawl back.
He discouraged the broody hens better than we could.
Pointing at …
Maybe it isn’t birds. The feeders are a creature magnet, even for rabbits and deer.
It could be squirrels, gray or red or the white-belly fliers (when you fly at night, wear white).
Or ground squirrels or kangaroo mice or Noreegan wharf rats (so far from a wharf, so far from Norway).
All my length.
A couple dozen tree species crowd this brief segment of the ring around the lawn.
The largest temperate rain forest is in Alaska.
I think we’re next: not many steps to fill the leaf book of a fourth-grade science class.
Leaf scape.
A table rose, for company, two feet away this instant.
White, the outside of the petals, inside hot fuchsia, as my love is.
Red, red rose.
The black flower is in the house.
Black velvet.
The red outside.
The thick sticky golden pollen is the same.
Velvet red.
And a little ways into the woods, the Dr. Seuss flowers stretch thin and wide, enticing.
Wood note wild.
Such abundance here, where peace and beauty overflow.
But threats surround us that are imminent—to our earth and food and water and air.
Amid the rumble of half a hundred human wars and war’s alarms,
I know I can’t be young again, but still shall hold her in my arms.
Salaam. Shalom.
Jul 12
Go to my website (& blog) for more information:
Book Covers:
~ first 
~ second
~ third 
~ fourth
