BARREN GROUND CARIBOU- Where the secretive caribou scatter forth, In a mystery far from the sight of man, See the light seep out of the silent north, See a frosted sky turn the color of sand. Their strange smell warming the soft air, The sounds they make in the dim light, Filling their passage, and lingering where The tundra takes them into the night Near the willows, that sink in the arctic mud Or on mossy banks, fleeing the dark In the glacial rivers flowing like blood Neath long tailed Jaeger and Harrier Hawk. And the solitude, total, yet incomplete Demands to be heard above the roar Of the awful silence in the absent heat Of the absent bodies on the wasted moor. On the windswept plains below the peaks, Remote and obscured by the growing gloom, Sheltered by glaciers and icy creeks, The arctic lilies and lupine bloom. And always below them, this they know, Whatever was once, comes not again For the Earth conceals Herself in snow So different now to what was then Before the rise and descent of Man And before the world had traveled on, When the greatest of all the rivers ran To an ocean, covered now, and gone. Where woolly mammoths so recently roamed In masses unknown on the grassy plain Where still stiffer and stranger winds have blown Lost and forgotten like the Pleistocene rain. What could be stranger than the single track Of the creature traveling far, alone In what once was soil, rich and black That the ice took away and returned to stone. Now the snowy owl glides above the haze Where the fields begin and the forest ends, And the caribou wander the lonely days Under barren skies, over barren lands.

SLOW POISON- Cloud forest, winter fog rolling in, streets empty at evening, slow poison. Friends walk alone along the canal, tramping through weeds under snow, for now. So like the woods are we- trees without reasons, carefully counting succeeding seasons- Unsure perhaps, of the paths we've chosen, unaware of the subtle effects of slow poison.

ICE and the SLEEP of BEARS Memory blurs the white silence settling over all The borders of sight, secret, buried in blankness. I am this winter Shrouded in dead crystals of ice, and ready, Like the solitary bear, to believe in being utterly alone. Ready to seek the comfort of the rocks, My heart hidden beneath the sleeping trees. Ready myself, to sleep under the low moon, Slow inner tides waxing and waning, Waiting for Earth to remember....