treeplanting journal

The dust from the logging roads coats my teeth, whiter now if only for the grimy tan of my face. Squished up with duffel bags and his long legs, there is silence and there is sunshine. It’s calm in this truck limbo, and I’ve been starved for calm.

The dandelions have burst forth overnight from the prairie floor. I’m planning a painting in my mind, how I’ll use an old toothbrush to splatter the yellow in atop the green grass, fluorescent in the lazy afternoon sunshine. The sky is bigger here than any sky I have ever seen. I can’t fathom a canvas big enough for the abundance of clouds, languid they lay about like corpulent Romans following a feast.

Beside me he shifts his hands on the steering wheel and I notice him noticing a bird flicking in the wind, its energy bursts through the stillness of the afternoon, but the fluidity of flight remains true to my tranquility. We do not speak.

(GP May 2009 planting journal excerpt)



meredith by the fire

At night, the sky smudged a gradient of cobalt to ash, she sits by the fire and makes an attempt at the moment. It’s all she can do. Zen falls like the crumbs from the cake of others and she’s there to catch a few in her swollen hands, savoring seconds of peace.

She’s pegged the restlessness of her mind to the vastness of her country, the never-ending possibilities of people and place; the hearts she’s broken and the hearts that have broken her and all the hearts lined up like bottles on a fence waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

Every pair of eyes she’s ever seen stay with her, become a constant presence, watching, judging, laughing. Here in the wilderness, the layers of herself have been peeled away and her soul cowers and spins, dances and winces, a grub in the sun. And she’s not sure if this means she’s lost or if it means she’s found.

(May 2009)


waiting things

Cigarettes smoke themselves
in anticipation
collars darken like the day
and still, still
boot darkened socks
wait on the floor
damp and alone.
Branches accumulate
and the open space
becomes tired and dirty
strewn with waiting things
patient like the earth
beneath fingernails
calm as the filth
in hidden crevices.