Your beauty, thought
and whim, the doom
& awe of a wild rain
Your stinging tongue
nettled flowers,
your imaginings vast
and rocky plains
Loyal as the roots of an oak
to the earth, a pencil,
a paper, a story maker
Of all your exquisite flaws,
Jo March, your pride…
My fat-throat spits tears
everywhere, tears
I squat to pee, of course, nothing but tears
my hair sweeps the briny puddles
my fingers splay to steady the soak of it
It‘s exhausting to keep outliving
the thought speaks to my limbs
just lie down, it burbles
I think of soap and…
He died that morning
in the way a leaf is released
from a tree
I could tell you the story
or you could imagine
the sadness of autumn
the bright colors
just before
the fall
May 10, 2022
Traveling down the hill past the big pond
the peepers, wild with spring
sing in my body as memory
in the softening light, two deer run
slowly from the trees knowing
this dirt road is theirs as much as mine
they pause and look back
as if to say, aren’t…
Anything I can muster as evidence
the smell of your coat still hangs in the closet
from our bed, thick-sleep crusts from my eyes
the insistence of the rising sun
the absence of your throat clearing
the pale blue eggshell shed under the pine
by the cracked driveway weathering
a history, a path forward…
After I’m Gone, Paint the Earth with my Ashes
for my daughter
You’ll find my song
in your memory
or in a stream
a still melody
until it bursts
like a willow in spring
I am the burble
and the bark
and the dormant place
from which buds form
I wrote a poem years ago
saved to a floppy disc in my early thirties
I was the narrator, the observer
legs over the arm of an old chair
book open across my lap
They brought in firewood
stacked it next to the hearth
soft words, something about the paperboy
a nod between…
Our father never taught us
my 3 brothers and me
to punch the bully back
no lessons in the basement
he taught from the woods
from the Friends Meetinghouse
never underestimate
the powerlessness of a tyrant
when 100,000 voices
encircle him chanting
Be the Voices
