adventure

Montana

| Megan
Absaroka Mountains, Paradise Valley, Montana. May 2025.

On Wednesdays

And sometimes, on Wednesdays, 
you feel altogether less than.
Less than creative. Less than
bright; less than enough. Still
there is this desire to burst some

seal in the universe to say what
you feel. And you determine
to send the man you love a letter
because you are also reminded
by your intro to writing classes

how powerful our interactions, 
entanglements with the natural
world really are. Reliving our
gorgeous weekend in Montana.
Wide skies, iridescent light. The river,

carving out its channel, hosting
bobbing rafts of geese, the
swift water constantly breathing,
caressing, quick-tickling its banks.
Feet, pinked, cold and smoothed

by silt and stones. The mule ears
sunshining in bunches on the
low slope of each sky-grazing
mountain range– Absaroka, Crazy, 
Gallatin, Tobacco Root– still white-

tipped with winter, now green-
black with pines, avalanche lines
and juicy jade undergrowth
all silently worshiping Spring,
new whorls of love made daily

Yellowstone River, Paradise Valley, Montana. May 2025.

Deluge

Spring, you may wander through my
soul in infinite spectacles of rebirth,
interrobangs of golden mule ears
apostrophes of purple monkshood,
little ellipsis of mountain service berries
punctuating each hillside and long
top-frothing grasses, mountain oceans
in growing breezes, a cloudy sky meant
to cast angles and halos, one
moment warm and the next a
whipping rain, a deluge,
steady then soft, pelting then gauze,
a corporeal mist clinging to river beds,
mountain roots and renewal

Peets Hill, Bozeman, Montana. May 2025.

Skin
shedding
morphing, learning,
lose, grow, shift, change
a year for becoming strong and centered
snake

Peets Hill, Bozeman, Montana. May 2025.


Blindness
absolute blindness
creates false hope, fists clenched and
clinging old, wet sand

Sight
when the grief subsides
the soul is filled with blinding
joy, internal sight

See
did you want to drive
your military complex
around on the street

Absaroka Range, Paradise Valley, Montana.




Aquarius

| Megan
Aquarius Timpanogos. Sun, cattails, and clouds. January 2025.

The First Universe was You
(Maybe one day it will all make sense. This is probably just my hubris talking.)

You were the first person I saw
—visually—as a Universe

I had been feeling it for a while–
this idea of the infinite

In the love I watched women
Give to everything, everyone

Around them, the spiraling arms of
Stars– known, each in their own sphere

I heard it in my head, when you
Explained: I am trying to love myself

In essence, “I contain multitudes,” and I
Chalked that line up to some god from

Our shared past-religion, but it turns
Out it was Walt Whitman

Describing women, of course, he was
Describing himself and thereby all

Humans, alike in our vastness, and then
A friend’s husband died, and I felt

It all over again, this idea that we
Are these very fragile, very short-lived

Phenomena, and yet, somehow infinite,
And don’t forget that must explain

How your trip was my trip, or I took
A part of your trip as my own trip

Like a feather in my mushroom cap
Like a rose in my funerary lapel

Because I am enough was what your
Psyche told you, and I am here to

Infinite down on that memo, that factor:
I am enough. You are enough. Multitudes.

You contain multitudes which is why
Making decisions out of temporary

Information must feel so hard. So,
Take my hand. Grab my spiral arm

Arm in arm. Here we go. Forever
Into the Unknown. Universe.

Glass Greenhouse. Neighborhood. January 2025.

Arms

To have the arms of the Universe flung out before
You. I’ve seen it with my own eyes—one arm rolling
Sushi with her son, another arm filled to the infinite with stars
Held comfortably under her daughter’s climbing shoes.
You are made of Everything—darkness and light– the stuff

Jeweled into the eternity of now, this moment.
Universe, can you hear her? Like listening to nuclear fusion
With a stethoscope—the breath, the pulse, the beat, the
Mother-heart giving life to all existent things, and even things
That may no longer be. But that act, the fusion at the

Core of the Universe—every opal clouded nebula, a nursery
Every blazing Azure star, a new creation, can you imagine if she
Knew she needed to become something new, and altogether
Different entirely. What if she knew that her core was burned
Out, her fuel exhausted and all of the stars, all of the

Beings that rested in her consciousness would once again
Become so much dust, so she died. She gave up her
Old form, her life, her arms spinning off into the horizon
She simply couldn’t go on fusing life together in that way
Explosion/Implosion it wouldn’t matter which way the

Translation took place, but the Matter of it all would always,
Always remain. The actual physical atoms of all she gave, all
She shaped, all she sacrificed, forever encoded in the stuff of
Galaxies, dwarf stars, and solar systems we’ll never lay eyes on
She knew it. Yet, she wept anyway, despite her knowing

Canal. Two ducks. Drainage pipe. January 2025.

Celebrate

| Megan
Timpanogos and Half Moon. Image, my own.

The Death

each stalk of grass
is hollow and barren
this time of year
skeletons of
viridescent pasts
like raw
leafless trees
memories of living
and of dying
the pulling back
the cocooning
of life in silent
night, darkness
chambers, interiors
of many plants and
animals teaches
us all about the
death and the
rebirth of life, light
so that we won’t
fully despair

Deer Creek. Image, my own.

The Return

the light
returns this morning
with the owls
they call
from tree to
branch, as sun

pinks surely
over the
charcoaled horizon
kilned through
night, and sealed in
the new, cold light

of this
winter morning
where I’m aghast
at the magic, memory
magnificence, majesty
transitive verb

of the whole
thing where I
am present
when the light
is seven minutes
old and each

photon graces
my retina with
the reminder
that the light
always returns
until it doesn’t

until the whole
sky is
bathed in numinous
halogenic possibility
the presence of
the now

as the light
returns
may we remember
the power of the
darkness
the importance

of slow, intentional
rest, the rejuvenating
properties of
sleep for a world
that simply needs
to listen to

the magic of the
intransitive verbs
of owls

Christmas Windmill. Image, my own.

Dark

Enfold me in your blackness,
I don’t want to be afraid of the dark
In fact, I want to embrace my shadow
Shadows of all that I thought would
Suck the marrow out of me, but instead
Offered me a respite, a resting place
A hallowed breath of solace and silence
Dark, the thing that so much incandescent
Luminosity is meant to fight, to ward off, as
Humanity wilts under all this light

Tamarisk and Gray Skies. Image, my own.

Space

Maybe the most surprising thing about poems is that they take a fair amount of space and time
The words are often all there, waiting on the lip, the tip of consciousness, but flow takes room
Takes open-ended realities, wide skies like altars in the arcing air, vast closenesses and distances
Which the heart contemplates, the healing place, the hell, the compassionate lengths to which a
Human will go to tell a truth, a peace, a playful nothing, a love, a life, a poem

The Road. Image, my own.

Don’t Die

when it began, I’m not quite sure,
but as of late my son has a new post
script for nearly every exchange,
“don’t die” he tells me as I start
the engine of the car, “don’t die”
he encourages as I head off to work
“don’t die” when the rain is falling
in sheets that darken each atom
of exposed earth, he must understand
something about the nature of life

Beloved and Time. Image, Aubreigh Parks.

Celebration

sometimes the celebration will be the growing of the light
minute by minute over the horizon, moment by moment
in our children’s eyes. Sometimes the celebration will be
the sleep, the forgetting, the separation and the longing
which brings deeper communion with the divine, the
place, the way, unsure, the path, the journey, one precious
step at a time. Sometimes the celebration will be the growing
of the self, the yearning, expanding, nearly cracking open of
your sternum with the enlarging, ever-beating heart, the lungs
full-burdened with life giving nitrogen plus oxygen, exhale the
heaviness and grief, inhale, close your eyes and let go

Timpanogos Sunrise. Image, my own.

Gold

| Megan
Sunset. November. Image, my own.

Beethoven Era

Can you imagine?
Deafness where once was joyous
Sound
Blindness where once filtrations of color-filled light
Ricocheted
Can you imagine?
Losing everything?
If you are human, the guess is, yes
But why must pain catalyze all our understanding? Is it
Truly our only teacher? Isn’t the promise of
Death
Enough to cause us to cling to love, to
Life, to now, maybe not. So maybe we go deaf, blind,
Senseless
Into that good night, into the dark, waiting for
The dawn with breath so small we barely live, sore
Respiration
Reaction, all part of this existence when what we
Thought we wanted most is gone, dematerialized where
Reality is echoed and
Chambered
Oh heart, please, live, please drink the night and day as
A cup of bitter sweetness, lasting but a blink
A piano hammer in the abyss, hammer to string, string
bing, bing, ba-bing, go, boogie,
Be

Gold Nike Shoes. Oakland Museum of California. Image, my own.

Andante

It will never do to keep running
Into yourself if you can’t look up,
Ponder the path of the stars in
The night sky, gaze with longing
And new eyes, on the moon with
Rapture, take in the horizon each
Day and walk into a new lifetime

Light Bulb(s). Image, my own.

Honey

Honey, laughter and green curry are all the #soulfood
I need the joy of bright kaffir lime leaves charged into garlic
and simmered over vegetables, a meal to carry us
through the ages, a gale of fascist hail and bull shit, the
storm of the century is upon us, and all we can do is cook,
sing, and watch the moon as it rises high in the night,
silent observer of her earthly neighbors what a perplexity
what a tragedy, only for a moment, all mixed with joy and
delight, how will we last, how will we survive the fight
join it, gear up, only history knows on this very first calm
snowy night. We hunker in, we knit, we resist like life
depends on it because it does, resistance can be small
nearly silent until the way is clear and that same moon
swims overhead as the path is lit in the quiet dark

Moon. Image, my own.

Orb

In reality
In the body
Black and gray
White and blue
softest aura
Hazing purple
Bold broad
Moon the
Clouds opaled
All around
Stars and sky
Dappled through
and Through
Lord, Bless
Gratitude for
Ohs and glitters
Heavens and Earth
The glory of it
All that lone
Full Moon

Gold. Leaves. Fall. Trees. Image, my own.

Air

| Megan
Stairs to the Coast. Oregon. Image, my own.

October Bowery

when fall begins to crystalize, like any change,
the first real storm front moves in,
the leaves which scudded about yesterday
are frozen to the sidewalk, gathering in
browning-yellow scrolls, little edicts of
what is to come, they thaw and scatter
again across streams and gullies where
the thin water still wants to feed the living
thing before being silenced in ice, or
leave monochrome sepias on pavement,
the Hunter’s moon, high and bright illumines
the grass, reedy wisps along the midnight walk,
the dusty path where the air cools, snappy,
crisp, that breath of winter’s coming, flora seized
red in its death, clinging to branch and vine,
each day more dried and dead, ruffled and flurried
by immediate breezes, sounding like Japanese
paper fanfared by a round and excited toddler,
portents of the next season soon to fall
in golden droplets of summer’s dreams
the ocher aspen leaves, in sheets and
flakes of fiery autumn light dazzling and
freshly disconnected from their source right
before they meet the dust and decompose

Sun, Sky, Beach, Life. Oregon Coast. Image, my own.

Strength

Growing is a season of its own, one of loving kindness rooted in faith
one of far-seeing vastness, while standing in sacred spaces. For whatever waves,
winds, and ways that will ever-continue to toss and take their course, stand
in your gifts and rest in fullness, plentitude. Delight in bounty and abundance.
Move from ire to the rich roundness of the good in all living things–
circles of true compassion and empathy which connect all creation– human,
animal, plant, living, all animate with atoms as the entire universe speaks the
soundness of its existence, the tenor of being, the voice of living and the lived

Ocean, Tide, Tree, Coast. Oregon. Image, my own.

Point

when i am in my
brain and heart i realize this
is the goddamn point

Woods. Oregon Coast. Image, my own.

Conscious Living

What is it to be alive?
In the rich, abundant world
A sterling jay’s deeply
Decked sapphire feathers
crested head
nestled in the magnolia bush
outside my window
the air as thick as dew,
yet moving as if on an
unheard music suspended
by the wind’s unseen breath

and ocean spume, spurl, churn
TO be part of Earth’s respiration
tide, current, wave, flow, coast
where Earth’s breath meets
land-sand, rock, tree, stone
every piece of physical
particulate of the confirmation
of all alive and breathing
beings, being moved
smoothed, rocked, waved, rolled
over and over in the sea’s bosom

Stones and Seal Carcass. Oregon Coast. Image, my own.

Ocean

I used to think I wasn’t an ocean
person. But these rocky, cliffy,
craggy knobs of sea-shorn trees,
smooth stones and crusty conglomerates
crab shells, jelly-fish skeletons, strips of
kelp carcass, and clings of driftwood
really wrap me into the rhythm of
the tide

Magic. Foam, mist, spume, churl, splutter. Oregon, Coast. Image, my own.

Know

I know what I am
doing, I don’t know any
thing other than that

I don’t know what I’m
doing, I don’t know any
thing other than that

Rock, Tide, Rush. Oregon Coast. Image, my own.