Black frame variations
from within white flowers,
moving like gray ghosts,
my two mule binoculars
pick up the first flags of winter
only a few feet above
with a rush of sound,
a flock of nearly two hundred
signaling the cold thrushes to come.

Banks of majestic cottonwoods stand dressed like golden spires among the evergreens;
caps of snow timber and brush thickets resound with bird song;
stuffing themselves with berries to the point of saskatoon brush,
feeding on the dry bohemian waxwings
through the blood-red patch of eggs and fledglings done
craft and care taken in their building of a canyon to go
other of the tribe of the world.

Decorating the face with color, ripening the grass and splashing the leaves of the
mythical land: of Eden, California, an island
peopled by a swarthy, robust, passionate race of
women living manless chivalry and derring-do,
the past is also lovingly maintained.  The state is golden yet.

Among them all, only the rough timberline
on the mountains, the September larches stand
the first flocks of migrating sooty-gray coots showing up on the bigger lakes
with their sharp ivory-white beaks and beating

From nesting splitting the wind their way with short wing strokes
in diving they are element, graceful and astonishing--a joy of grace and power

For they are the biggest of all deer and move pure
blood stirring with the first
and small songbirds already gone.