A Note to Spotted Towhee:
Listen, the clouds move slowly, sun-lit
Black-tailed deer with wild bird seed on their noses
translate hoof prints, Western red cedar and stories of opossum
perhaps an artist dips her horsehair brush into a palette of fluorescent paint
salmon-pink, mandarin orange sunrise, feathers the color of musical notes
Listen, the deer stand with you, near the wild roses
What stories are you going to tell?
She was once a rainforest
underpinned with understory
crowned with a dense canopy
the golden-crowned kinglets spoke to her
before the white-breasted nuthatch returned
chi-chi-chi watch your chi
kwi kwi kwi they repeated
seven years in the wilderness
below the swollen lymph nodes
nodules she thinks she can’t breathe
when breath wind spirit
ruach πνεῦμα prana qi aliento
the same word in hundreds of languages
she has forgotten her language of rain
rain wind indweller
szfo ndz
txxt tzzt
sky-holder and the humans remind her tzzt
just let it hum in your throat
mi alma azul turquoise aquamarine
cerulaean cierto cobalt cyna skyway
hummingbird blue is the color of love she said
stellar jay said blue is the new black
cancer round in her belly in her throat in her thyroid
a tumor like a coelenterate soft mucinous
she drinks in Pacific Yew trees
plants them around her yard taxol taxotere
moss green forest green healing green
the birds are speaking a language of under story
the ground shifts beneath her
earth heart beat rattle hum
it is raining somewhere
in the Amazon, the Tongass and Patagonia
the immense blue-grey al fin del mundo
filled with stories
of community
a canopy of rain.
