Francesca G. Varela's Blog, page 7

Cedar Rain

There is a cedar tree
who I visit on each hike,
and when it rains,
the water hangs
in its fine-woven branches,
as though in a spider web–
in small, clear globes,
that reflect dark green fog,
and licorice fern,
and youth-on-age,
and my own face, too,
and the water running heavy through the creek,
and the little brown birds
jumping from one branch to the next,
knocking the pearls down, down, through the leaves,
until one hits my cheek,
cast away,
from the raindrop world.

Cloudside

[image error] Photo by Roberto Nickson on Pexels.com

The clouds cling to the hillside,
worn pink-red
by the growing storm
and the softness of sunset,
and behind me the mountain hides
beneath the river
in the sharp light of early dusk
in the clear, swirling air,
as the first drops of rain
drum and join the water.

Stone Ocean

[image error] Photo by luizclas on Pexels.com

I feel the moon behind the sky
and I hear the ocean,
the click of fish,
the soft, curling strings of sunlight
caught up
in the salt-veils,
and I feel
the pulse of waves,
smoothed by wind, one by one against the shore,
as I float on my back,
the moon’s ocean
the dark spots,
the mares,
the old seas
made of stone.

Iridescence

[image error] Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Outside my window, a hummingbird speaks. Its voice is the same as the sunset–the same as the tossing of cedar boughs in the southwest breeze. I know it immediately, before I even see it. And when I look up, the hummingbird is hovering–the sun glinting off its feathers, just like the iridescence of an abalone shell I once found at the beach, just like the sparks of light in the Salish Sea, the bioluminescence that glowed with each kick of our legs; just like the moon setting into the water.

Halloween

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The light is leaving, sewn golden along the edges,
and I rush to chase the veins of rust along the stream,
as the light guides me through the tunnels of vine maple, and oceanspray,
and beneath the small, dark tree-ferns
and the moss-sided maples,
and the one ash tree that grows wind-bent up the hill,
until at last I turn around and the sun is behind me,
caught up in the wind-fluttering leaves,
ready to fall into the firs,
the way a wave pulls gently at the sand,
and I hold my hand to the dying light,
until my skin is as gold as the maples,
drawn into the autumn darkness,
and the sun returns to its roots, its dusk home below the earth,
leaving the chickadees to call the night forth, steady and soft in their songs.

The Scrub Jay in the Juniper

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A western scrub jay sits in the juniper,
the blue scarf down his back the same color as its berries,
and he sits and watches his cousins, the crows,
fly overhead against the city sky, caught up in dust,
and he hears the empty click of a truck, somewhere off in the distance,
and the heavy silence woven between the houses, the apartments, the parked cars, the sidewalk corners,
and he tilts his head toward my apartment’s windows,
and he looks straight at me, to where I sit alone, through the glass, and he stares at me, his black eyes calm as the clouds overhead, the ones tinged with the darkness of fall, the ones fringed with early orange sunset, and we both watch each other, just for a short moment, until he flies off, and I settle into the night’s solitude.

The Language of Waterfalls

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It takes a while to learn the language of waterfalls, because each speaks a slightly different dialect, but if you go to the same waterfall again and again, you’ll learn to hear its voice. At first, you’ll find it tucked between maidenhair ferns, as the droplets fall, and then you’ll pick it out of the dull thud of water absorbed into moss, and the quiet drip as they roll off the shoulders of saxifrages, down crevices into dark volcanic stone, and into drifts of cow parsnip tucked along the edges. And then, at last, you’ll hear it in the wind, the waterfall’s own wind, which blows your hair back as you step toward it, this waterfall which has always been alive, and you hear it call out in greeting, in the same voice as stars, and rivers, and mountains; the voice of old beings, whose lives are too long for us to imagine.

Heritage

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When I was a child, my grandmother gifted me
a small replica of the stone used to grind corn
into masa,
and I have it on my kitchen shelf, even now, next to my mortar and pestle.
At my parent’s house, there’s a big one, a real one,
the name for which I have been told by so many
it is not necessary to know,
but which I repeat to myself,
sing to myself,
the defiant song of clay beneath my skin.

Sun Smoke

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The maples and horse-chestnuts soften,
their casted shadows
torn from the sun,
cracked open by golden smoke,
the sun painted,
not long ago, like a strange, eclipsed moon,
or the eye of some god,
too fierce to look upon from our small earth.

Wildfire

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White dark
and a hummingbird
pressed into juniper,
a ghost-god,
wings unseen,
and, hours later,
a hawk, tail stripes larger
than a planet’s rings,
and, at dusk, a family of robins
bathed in the pink mottle,
their sun kept in a drawer and cotton ball muffled,
and a bat
flying above them,
a rock through a river,
fireside, cityside,
together.