Fish Folds

The salmon run turns

on a limb of the Pacific

remote missions trailing

great harvesting nets

sluicing sea spittle,

sonar battens down

pound for pound

blip for blip

national hatcheries spawn

stakes for lawmakers

to rush cutters

until it's in the numbers

for towns marked by tarred pilings

barnacled green gray freighters

to lay up docks

sealed in tetanus

let shore fall to tides

air sift through to fish

graceful in a slow count

coursing in locked arcs

metallic buoyant bodies.

(Originally appeared in Columbia Poetry Review)

Found Roses

You wonder whether I even noticed

the five holes in the flower beds

about the time you brought over some house plants.

I didn’t want to see them

as more than more possum’s undertaking

stirring fusty leaves from the crusts around rhododendrons

and ferns mom found in the woods.

You love to say, she loved her roses, just like oma.

There are others. Deer from the ravine

bit off last year’s first blossoms just blooming,

even the attic squirrels skitter down the lilac tree

into freshly planted myoga, growing well in bricked-in bog.

The shade between houses lets fungi get a leg up—

one year pruned too close—more than it could pull through

in a rainy year; dry summers are too late,

the cherry covered in ants and we

set a trap for the gnawing in the rafters.

If I catch a squirrel how many seeds from the garden

will sprout up in its new woods somewhere south?

If you’d just asked for starters from roses or any

of the others, how proud, how we were sharing. 

(Originally appeared in Crab Creek Review)