"white spirits and gray"

another
book
cover
asking for
a Child Readers record!

since taking a picture of this in a shop in Ashland, i've read the first few pages of Eden Phillpott's story online--a description of a stone village by the sea--and regret not buying it.

2 photos

salmon river, or

...on the set of green stars

Of--the mouth in the wood

The mouth in the wood by Loren Chasse
yet another instrument generously salvaged from a flea market by my father...

listening to orcas island

During the night, perhaps a dozen otters visited the deck of the cabin. We awoke hearing the sounds of their running and sliding across the wet wood, a few shrill squeaks, and the surf raking and tumbling stones. In faint light from moonlit clouds, we could see the silhouettes of the otters poised suspensefully on the low dune between the cabin and the beach.
Elsewhere that day, the singing of raindrops and mud along a footpath....

Cymbals spinning

Scenes from a performance at Portland's Bamboo Grove--featuring paintings of rocks, trees, leaves and natural forces by my friend Eugene Lee. Eugene asked me to make music using metal, yet I can't resist an opportunity to make another landscape of paper and sand.

summer boredom, part last: the Hoh River's mouth

Our steps stretch
from entire tree
to entire tree,
sent to sea,
tumbled
and bleached
by waves and beached
amid the clatter
of driftwood elbows and ribs, sloughed in deep beds,
all chatter
beneath feet.
At last, the tent pitched in this dark,
on hard-to-find sand.
Which acre of perfect round stones
most purrs and most clacks in the laps of the tide?
And of what ground should our fire be built on the sky?
Seeing none of this, really, until morning,
the ghosts of whole forests tumbled and bleached
at our backs on the heaps.

Seaward, an ominous solid
ticks and thrums
beneath the lunar blood-thorn
sinking,
dragging again
the day's light to sea.