lost & found in flyover country
The maple trees along my street hold on to green leaves that ought to be red by now and yellow like the sun that won’t stop warming us, I mowed the yard one last time before putting the machine away for the season, optimist about almost nothing beyond the end of yard work, believing it … Continue reading October
The life coach wants twenty-two hundred dollars to talk to me on Voxer, meet with me on Zoom, to share the keys to the internet kingdom with me, she will unlock the secrets to a life less disaffected, but I will have to do the work, she says, as if it were a choice, as … Continue reading Life Coach
We are born of collision, objects in motion meeting objects at rest, God may not play dice with this universe, but he plays pool, marking each day on the green baize, blue chalk dust, cosmic cue of ash and inlay, he breaks us with every dawn, birds fall silent, the sky cracks, see how we … Continue reading God Plays Pool
Much like my commitment to this blog, my practice of writing a daily poem begins with good intent at the start of each year, only to founder in a few months on the rocks of “good gods and goddesses, these are awful.” When I was younger I used to send poems to an English teacher … Continue reading Junk Drawer
The man in the interview was trying his best to make supply-side management sound like something you would choose to do with your one precious life, while the show host wondered if students today were prepared for such complex work upon completing their four-year college degrees after six years of secondary school and six more … Continue reading Supply Side Managers
Sometimes I hear my neighbor talking to her dog in the yard, and I wait until she goes inside before I take my trash to the bin. I am equal parts misanthrope and recluse, wishing for that elusive neighborhood in which there are no neighbors. When I lived in the city I wore sunglasses in … Continue reading Unmasking
I came to your garden one moonlit night a spade in my hand, and a rake and a hoe, we planted potatoes until the sun rose, pink sky, bleached horizon, you made me promise to return in the autumn with a fork and a bowl, you said there would be butter enough for the two … Continue reading Spring Planting
Things have occurred: wildfires and uprisings and super-spreader events, a few holidays, an election in the U.S. and a bit of sore-loser wilding on a steps of the capitol in response to that election. A month and change into the new year and the COVID-19 pandemic has not gone away, though there are vaccines now, … Continue reading It’s Been a Minute
There’s no solace in knowing it has always been so — the angry mob, the fist and the fury — knowing doesn’t help at all. Today I took an online test to see what mathematics I might recall from decades of long ago learning, word problems concerning trains and speed and distance, angles of intersecting … Continue reading Locomotive Breath
If my imagination were not so much a part of me I could write about places less frigid. But I am a package deal. Body cold. Mind cold.
Bodhichitta practice. Slow. No striving. No reaching. We breathe into the heart center and find it armored. Of course it’s armored. We breathe anyway. To make friends with a feral cat we sit nearby. For a day, a week, a month, a year. As long as it takes. One day we may find ourselves sitting … Continue reading No Time at All
It took longer than any of us expected, our children were older than we were and theirs were older still. I remember the fortune in your cookie urging you to be like water and you said who has that kind of time? The soles of your boots are worn right through at the place where … Continue reading Preppers
Snow crusted garden, last year’s coneflower grey as old bones, q-tipped and stiff in the wind, the neighborhood scoundrel cat passes through the damp and molder in search of a wren to kill, cowl mane the color of gravel and thaw, the color of February, the color of the shadow that followed me home, the one … Continue reading February 2.0
In the news about deportations to countries less worthy I heard a chance remark keywords: poverty, extreme a rhetorical question of how one might fare if given the boot after living so long in the Promised Land to go from so much to so very little Yes, yes, it’s true: newsroom pencils break along fault lines … Continue reading In the News
The snow started falling yesterday morning. It came down in fat motes, curtains blowing sideways. Sleet at midday, popcorn against the windows. The cats slept. Drifts accrued in doorways, domes of white arose on backyard patio tables, wedding cakes for winter brides, Birds tracked in a day drained of color, crossing rabbit divots. Midway through … Continue reading Winter
I closed the door on you. This is not a metaphor. You were snoring. I couldn’t abide. I need a quiet house. That’s not your fault. You disorder me. You are a distraction, a leaking faucet: dripping, dripping. Reminding me (I do not need your reminder) of all I’ve left undone. Maintenance foregone. Weatherstripping. Yard … Continue reading Love Sleeps
My writing process is circuitous. It winds along rivers and wanders through woodland and ends up in back yards, usually my own. I seldom know where I’m going until I get there, and even then it takes time to realize this is the place. My new collection of poems is available now. Wander with me, … Continue reading The Breakup Poems
Who knew it was all so fragile? The ship of state a houseboat of cards pontoon shantytown heaving in the hot humid bluster of a grown man’s tantrum. Sad! Pretend I’m crazy. It’s how we get things done. In school they taught us how a bill becomes law, powers held separate, checks against power to … Continue reading Ship of State
When the snow comes we stay in the house with mugs of strong tea and honey, fleece and flannel, buffalo plaid and log-cabin quilts, The fire burns steady, kettle set to simmer, it mists the air like hot breath against a pane of glass jackfrosted opaque. We press our fingers to the frozen edge, co-mingle … Continue reading Death Toll
Here is the part both hard and easy: When you see what’s missing and it’s all that you (simply) stopped doing while you went about earning your keep, all the choices you made in favor of a full wallet, which isn’t ever so full, is it? Not nearly so full as what isn’t there, what … Continue reading Hard as That, Too
I. It’s the water that carries us, after all, like mermaids astride the glistening shell of the giant sea turtle, we are slippery wet, slick as newborns. We are filled with the oceans, we are alive. All my friends are anemones, supple, pliable, bendy beneath the waves, the salt and the sea that softens the … Continue reading No Hard Feelings
We walked across this desert once, red dirt rising to meet us, the impressions made by our bared soles no more lasting than the thin light of dawn unzipping earth from sky. I remember standing with you on this spot, do you remember this spot, where we met the ones we might have been and … Continue reading Dust
She sat with me on the porch and we shared tea from an earthenware pot, a brew of gathered leaves, years of careful selection, berries dried on a tin tray, saved in a paper envelop, their hard little tartness intact, rosehips culled from long dead flowers, we drank from small cups while the bees scuttled … Continue reading Reading the Leaves
Perhaps it was the leaded gasoline that did it. Gone too late in all our happy motoring, the burnt aftermath lingering in our cells, permeating our formative years, our young-country brains, so much soft mineral marking our fantasies, we believed we were super-powered, turbo-charged, we thought we could fly like dragons through the sky, but … Continue reading Lead
