When Words Grab Nature. Poems by CA Guilfoyle

I want to go for a walk in the woods with CA Guilfoyle. I don’t imagine we’d say much. I’d simply want to share in the silence of the forest around us, observe her as she lets it permeate her every sense. An astute lover of nature, her poems are odes to the natural world. Time is marked solely in the fading or growing of light, clouds drifting in and out, a flower bud awaiting a new season to bloom or the visibility of the stars. Guilfoyle calls Portland, OR and Tucson, AZ, her home, and her poems travel between those opposed landscapes. The “saguaro forests” and “the mad sun” of America’s southwest desert make her lips “lizard dry” in the poem, “The Mad Sun”. She’s a long way from Portland then, from the enveloping rainy grey hue personified in “Grey”. She writes reverently of both places, like being in love with two drastically different people who ignite the same singular love and appreciation. Each poem ends right on time; not abruptly or weighted down with a vain need to conclude it or answer the unanswerable. They surrender to the moment’s passing and align with the poet’s simple sensibility, and her hope for the eternal beauty of nature.

the bracken woods

By these woods I’ve come, wildly green
mossy step of days, long the forest rain
refresh my breath, breathe deep of trees
hovering grey ghostly steam
the smoking warmth of sun that comes
to sing with birds, perched upon
soft sword and leather fern
laced with berries wild
and faeries good
sing green of home
they wildly roam, safe amid
the bracken woods

Grey

You lingered far too long
with rain clouds, your morning fog
I waited in mists of rain, the days
for sun to warm, to wrap it’s arms once more
to watch the steam of scented cedars
I sat silent under great trees
of a rhododendron forest
kept looking for buds
a hint of flowers
to come

Heron

Mourning – you flew over indigo waters,
landing
Stealthy stalker you walked the shallows
billing silvery minnows
On rust red stilts, you’re built
to move in watery fields
Eyes piercing depths of algae blooms
rippled, your swaying seaweed room
Silent hunter,
feathery plumed

Transcendent

Breath of life, it is a wild ocean
always a tide coming and going
in this place, it does not linger long
never holding on, only drifts quietly into night
into stars, into fleeting sparks of fire flies
or in the night waters, a ghostly glow
of phosphorescence, a transient trail
of luminescence that soon
fades and reappears to light
the deepest depths
of sea

the mad sun

When I dream this desert turns green, blooms
clouds race where mountain lions loom
ash gray, cool rains come, blue
a redolent wind of desert sea
rushing waves, sand blown
sculpted saguaro forests
pale flowered yellow
drinking every drop
now this eve we drink
now before another dawn
of the mad thirsty sun

My lips are cracked leather
lizard dry, my breath melts into mirage
beetles emerge from dark caves
in flashes of iridescence, crawling
surreal sand paintings, tiny tracks
art for cactus wren, hunting

Here, beyond yet another
sparkling diamond mound
lies a wild sea of the sailing ships, I’ve found