Fannie felt beside the point. The funeral home was just across the parking lot and she could still see the staff milling about. She, the last remaining attendee, was not feeling any particular need to push the boundaries of...
Read MoreTides are getting higher, much higher than before. Water is flowing into the wooden house built on the highest point on this island. He stands in front of the house, murmuring, “I guess it’s the last day.” He isn’t sad; he is...
Read MoreTwenty miles outside of Eugene, I saw a hitchhiker standing on the side of the McKenzie Highway. He was wearing a faded army field jacket, and he had a small red daypack slung over one shoulder. He looked about as okay as...
Read MoreAs I drove north along the Hudson River, I reveled in the cool morning air. It would be a beautiful St. Patrick’s Day; a perfect day for my concert at the retirement home, followed by an afternoon appearance on a local tv...
Read MoreNorthern New Mexico I sense in sun’s first frost breath their eagerness. My crown’s rose-plated gold this morning signals it’s time. Some will fly east. Others will settle in my shadow. They will age, and in aging, renew me, as...
Read MoreHow did the humble geometry survive, atop a ridge of hundred-mile views, alone, severed from its once indivisible self, the high blue-washed plains? Inviolate, save wind, it waits…voiceless, lost to memory, a patch of...
Read MoreI am, in the moment’s mindless rhythm, far from perfect. Far from escaping, for the two of us, a six-second quake of perfection. Six seconds to stir life’s beginning, middle and end. Six seconds to unravel life, yours,...
Read MoreFifty-Two feet of Malay teak and Ohio Valley steel. A blade of curvaceous prow, at which men whistle and women swoon. Two 300-horsepower John Deere diesels chug from Seattle to Hawaii on a single tank of gas. This is his...
Read MoreFor Caroline Kingston You sit holding the hand of one who is, who in moments will become was. You say nothing, everything in your touch. Your hands once beckoned, coaxed breath into the world. Now you listen for breath’s...
Read MoreOur village escaped the war. We heard skirmishes nearby, at the edge of the woods. That was all. After each engagement, tired soldiers wafted into the square like dried leaves piling up against the steps of the church. In the...
Read MoreFox’s world is a circle that spirals from dawn through the sleeping heat of the day into dusk. And when the moon lifts up light from the pond Fox journeys with her shadow through the night. She follows a compass track— she knows...
Read MoreFox listens to what the creek whispers across the valley before dawn, a riddle that pulls at the threads of her fragile world the places she roams at the ragged edge of a broken circle under a sun that wrings the last drops from...
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