The plastic hummingbirds that glow at night seem a lifetime ago since I gave them to my mother-in-law and she hung them on a hook off her deck. There’s even a sense of fall in the air, that dry rattle… Read More ›
pacific northwest
Say goodbye to the Hoh
The sea spills its guts out to anyone who will listen, just hurls itself up and forgets it’s told the same story before: two black heads in the water floating that could be humans staring at us but they are seals,… Read More ›
Soft shoulders
I’d had them for a long time, but hadn’t worn them in a long time, the Vietnamese fishermen pants I used for Yoga in the studio at my gym at work, standing on my head with a wife beater, I… Read More ›
The Safeway in Chewelah, WA
On the drive back I make my kids listen to Townes Van Zandt since it feels like we could be in Texas it’s so hot, everything flat and beaten down by the sun. The songs about places he’d been in… Read More ›
A new path to the Lantern Tree
I’m driving my kids into the deserts of eastern Washington where it’s near wildfire season with no appreciable rain in 30 days, and we stop at a Texaco near the town Vantage, and I think surely that smoke in the… Read More ›
Shy bear lookout
The forest has grown in now, this time in spring the green darkens and I am inside a giant’s beard hacking my way through fronds and fallen limbs, unsure where I’m going or why, just that I need to be… Read More ›
Then I was the remnant of a tale (for Carver)
It is a nothing day, a gray day, a throwaway day and I have disappeared into a crack in the sofa with all those forgotten things, a no-man. I have dream-drafts to send me off, sounds of the dryer and… Read More ›
When the skin once so taut loses shape
I got to the intersection and wasn’t sure which way to go. When there’s nowhere to go and you can go anywhere, it’s like spinning a Roulette wheel, deciding which way to go. I took the same, windy road that day I… Read More ›
Climbing cocks, steep peaks, dry tools (2)
Brad and I camp in the snow by an abandoned hunter’s cabin up Black Canyon with my dog Ginger, who puts her nose in Brad’s eye and causes it to swell up like a walnut because Brad’s convinced there’s foreign… Read More ›
On faith and football and dreams
Ginger and I have been out corkscrewing hillsides in the Issaquah Alps, trying to lose track of time and find ourselves in the woods. I carry my notepad with me and stop to write, and she comes to collect me…. Read More ›
Bill Pearse 