Morning Slit of Light
At the end
of a long driveway winding
through ponderosas, I listen
to the birds, the creek, the birds eating
chokecherries. I’ve begun to lean
into what cannot be explained. Slit of morning light
through a thousand red pine needles. Absences
are not love or black horses
or stones. They are music.
Three pileated woodpeckers
are a heart murmur through the forest.
I want to feel alone but don’t. What I remember
is not September wind, aspens, the light luminous
and hidden, but my contradictions,
how the unsayable
hung like a red berry in the back
of my throat.
Lift
The cabin is surrounded by sloughs that swell
the bridge, fill the gulley with water, with swans,
cranes, and ducks. Everything is afloat.
The cabin faces south. Drinks the sun.
The windows are high enough to see the treeline
of Washout Mountain. I fill my mouth
with words like moss, stone, storm, slip. Wet
meadows search for more light,
more water. Stay here long enough
and my body will become a skin-on-frame
boat—my lungs stretch, become the canoe
shape, bend into the deepening
blue-green rush. Who can withstand
this loon-sense, this fluttering?
Scorch
1.
Beneath a fir
trickling sap, I’m tempted
to say: give me back
my opalescent tears.
There are shapes, tall and inky
against the windless valley.
Grass is a fire
before it knows it is a fire. The land
is friendly when I can see this far
between the trees
2.
There may be ash. And smoke.
What about
the moss-covered stones? Aspen leaves
and their endless shaking? A giant silk moth
opens paper birch wings
slowly. Spellwork,
dreamwork. What about
the bitterroot and beetles,
their iridescent bodies? What about
the spectre branches
in moonlight? I keep looking
for where the light ends
but it doesn’t.
3.
My body is
the balsamroot flower.
Joy isn’t a feeling. It’s the way
I emerge from this earth somewhere between
one thought and the next, or cresting
the col into a blaze of yellow
bloom. Petals falling.
4.
I’ve time-lapsed and walked for hours
around the lip of this burn
but have never spoken
the language that parsed cones
and seeds to fine ash.
One morning, I heard burnt
deadfall.
5.
There may be dust. And drought.
I may long for water
and walk far to find a phthalo blue
sky. A thin soot
may fall on everything.
But for now,
I move quietly
with so much depending
on a field of tall bunchgrass
gathering sun.
Natalie Rice holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She has been published by Gaspereau Press: Devil’s Whim Chapbook Series, The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, Event Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The Malahat Review, Contemporary Verse Two, and Lake: Journal of Arts and Environment, and her poem “Murmuration” was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in November 2021. She lives in Kelowna, B.C.
Header photo by Jane Rix, courtesy Shutterstock.
