Bristlecone 3

 

The new issue of Bristlecone, Colorado's latest online litzine, is out -- thank you Joe Hutchison! 

Go  Here 

to read the work of Patricia Dubrava, Jeff Foster, Beth Paulson, Daniel Klawitter, Lary Kleeman, John D. Levy, David Mason and yours truly. 

Below's the poem of mine that appears in the mag. The Rainbow Family is considering hosting this year's national gathering in Colorado:

Rainbow Gathering

-for Dolores LaChapelle

Purple lupines tell us more than park rangers

when we camp amid their wolfish blooms

Tug their starry leaves until the dew

seeps into our skin & we come to realize 

what a wet kiss can really mean

"That ain't dew," pipes up McRedeye

"that's coyote piss.” And the laughter we

hippies ring from the bell of our mouths

announces not ecstacy’s vespers but the 

zen koan of the Trickster's leer. The fear 

in the cop’s sneer. Despite the arguments

for & against Earth First!, Murray Bookchin

coast redwoods & the superiority of the

sensuous, we’ve learned how to drum, hum

& chant. How much morning tai chi teaches 

us in the shadows of Shandoka's slopes

How quickly we can recover the lost harmonies

of the Wild. How deep Nature’s alive inside us

Hungry hawk chicks nested in the branching

of our neurons. Whole fields of timothy &

escaped orchard grass up against hot splashes

of Indian paintbrush. Golden mariposa petals

Wind-whipped groves of spindly doghair

tremuloides, false hellebore, sweet cicely &

& the 40-year flowering of green gentian

All the plant lore that any good Crone knows

Hiking with her we stumble into beauty

Carry home stone. Bone antlers. Trilobites &

fat boletes to remind us on the way to & fro 

what’s meant in taking the time to lose

ourselves in skies gone psilocybin. To grok 

bristlecone pine impervious to alpine gusts

To settle into the embrace of our more

than human family, and even if only

for a few days, to hear our own opened 

hearts singing us back into the mystery