by Rachel Walker
Point to the sky
and tell me again
how granite formed
an owl’s face:
deep crater eyes
and mouth of shadow.
*
Mid-June: snowmelt
floods the valley
and a storm tears
two plum trees from the yard,
hurling branches
into the garden.
We kneel between
raspberry bushes
until our thighs burn.
We eat berries dirty,
pay no mind to the tiny
bugs crawling at the bottom
of our bowl. We scrub
and scrub our bodies
and still the water runs
amber-colored at our feet.
*
Through the eye of a raven we watch
wreckage float on ruptured ice:
fish hook and sheen of oil, oval
curve of a hairline. Out of a green
mouth, a zucchini blossom
opens its soft-fingered fist.
*
What can we
offer the valley?
Late summer and
the river slows,
combing grasses
along the valley floor.
Green is bleeding
into blue, bleeding
into the shadow
of an unkindness
of ravens turning away
from the sun.
Charred wood rises,
feathers and goat bones
and I am salt
to the current.
Rachel Walker is a poet from Maryland. She currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she is an MFA candidate at UNLV. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Emerson Review, jmww, MudRoom, and The Ekphrastic Review.
Hawaii Pacific Review 