Poems
Composing poems continues to be my way of having a conversation with living. I’m honored and thrilled to share these published poems with you, and hope the resonances you find in them support your own journey of creativity.
TRAVEL GUIDE
The mail has ceased
to find me; I am at large
in this landscape. Dissolving
here in the spacedark,
this incessant surf of stars and rocks,
not holding my breath before
the next magnetic wave takes
me, breathes into my mouth do not stay,
heaves and plunges me so my body
scrapes against dust that was once sand-
moored stones to know only the body
is limited. There are modes of travel
which begin with your back
to the horizon, sweeping out until
the shore slips under this sea; you can only hear
what sound like gulls, squalling for a place to land.
(Co-Winner, Space2Create Poetry & Art Competition)
DEMARCATION
Third grade, beside the water fountain.
A boy kissed me
for the first time, then spat ugly
girls smell like old sandwiches.
Lucky to have learned
that certain slant of love,
the metal scent of doing without.
High school graduation, basement couch.
A girl kissed me
for the first time, then exhaled
me like the spittled soot
from an enemy’s cigarette.
Lucky to have crushed the sear
of pleasure, a chrysalis under my boot.
I live alone in the woods where smoke
slips between pines, trails the syntax of rocks
and stumps. I think about what can be told,
that we ask words to hold so much shadow.
The lake is a green mirror that teems
with clouds. Scanning the far shore,
I see a fish leap into a brushstroke of sun,
then return to what it knows
the others have made without solitude.
(Selected by Richie Hofmann as Runner-Up, Fifth Annual Sewanee Review Poetry Competition; published in The Sewanee Review, Fall 2023)
SKY, FENCE, FIELDS
He’d used his life well, mostly low to the crops.
Would leave no trace, as Lao Tzu said in the book
he carried, frayed in the pocket of his last flannel shirt.
He stood lone in the field, smoothing the soft
cord overalls he’d always planted in, all the trowels
and hoes given away to Great Maude Gates,
who still stood 6’2 at 101,
and just last week helped him mend
chicken wire fence at the edge of the lettuce rows.
Old Jed Barker’d come around to collect
the tin coffee pot, frying pan and a few odd pieces of silverware.
The shed out back was falling down anyway,
would soon be just a pile of rattler runs in corn dust.
Nope, he thought, don’t need to leave behind a thing,
staring out into the folds of corn
where for a moment he thought he saw
his own hand brushing down the silk,
or beckoning him to walk farther out
than he’d ever thought a farm could go.
(Published in Ontario Review, No. 48, Spring/Summer 1998)
AVRIL, ILE SAINT-LOUIS
–for Jack Gilbert
It is true it is all about light here.
That blonde drape of midday
suspended in the courtyard,
the way the hem of noon
uncreased across the simple table,
set for two and unattended
as if waiting
for the cool stucco walls
to loose their scrim of calcimine
and flush ochre, each fold of plaster
releasing a new sweep of light,
so you could see there is no surface
which cannot be transformed,
that the sudden slant of the door
opening into the sun
is the way a real life could be lived here,
a limen over which you could step,
abide in the land
that has no word for home.
(Published in Chelsea 63, 1997)
FOSS HILL
This is the slope which stands for all
of winter: that January afternoon
of sledding runs, a new pink snow-suit,
grown-ups smoothing down the snow
into angels. From the top of the hill
she felt she could soar to the town’s
very edge, just before it slid
into the Connecticut river, gliding
over puffed white lawns, insistent
green of firs, the glazed granite
in Pine Street cemetery–
but this was more a careen
than a soar, that swishing of metal
runner sharpened on hidden ice
no way to brake, calling daddy to save
her and he did, breaking the sled’s
shot across his chest, daughter
falling hard against his face, the crack
of his nose, father’s blood on the snow,
the most perfect red she’d ever seen.
(from: On the Verge, Plinth Books, 1997)