Author: admin

Friends, today is cold everywhere else but hot again in Arizona, the sun’s friendly flame on high, the slow cooked poet on fire in Yuma. Any winter warmth is celebratory weather. Time to hold a festival for vegetables and...

The tongue counts its inventory of teeth 200 times a day. Still the dentist probes my mouth for cavities, suspicious something is debauched. Sixty years have left emptiness in the white cemetery of my smile. And here we go...

I have driven to Layman Lake again to see it rippled and broken by wind and to realize one thing is always covered by another— this land by this lake, fish by shadows and light, sorrow by a brave face. Tomorrow they will hide my...

After waiting all summer for the pears to grow sweet, he was called away by a friend’s slow death, the week the fruit turned yellow, a double loss. Now the trees are thick with blossoms. Bees swarm their boughs. The sky glows...

In pale moonlight, stone gods, Twisted cypress jut Out from headlands. Witness how in my dream The blue eyes of the primevalist Are colored with a terrible excess: Too blue, much too blue, entirely Lacking objectivity, desolate,...

Finally the tourists go, The young girls with their figs and honey, Young men who squat exposing their privates, Small children drowsy, Old men and women leaving at best a few pennies. Tonight the moon rises like ivory against...

Crying clown, why have I always loved you? Because you also laugh, because I played puppets as a child and a clown was my favorite. And the Punch and Judy shows, the sock and rock, the way they never parted, playing...

after Picasso Emerging from a cave the half and half creature turns a huge black head to us, shocks with fierce eyes. White horns curve from an armored brow. The minotaur’s muscular arms and hands, pale as mine, hold a horse...

My 39-year-old self had no idea what my 70-year-old mother’s body was screaming when she opened her eyes in the ICU and said, I’m in agony. Multiple arteries rerouted to her drowning heart, pain meds reduced to keep that muscle...

Not a tree really. Moved out to a deck every spring, back in when fall bites and dark drops. Mother once said, The low forties shocks the roots. Wouldn’t want your roots shocked, would you? As I moved my jolted roots, from a...

ODE TO MY PANDEMIC AMARYLLIS I coddle the ochre-umber knob of you into the old goldfish bowl I’ve stoked with compost, set you on the sill above the sink, so as I scrape plates and suds tumblers, I can overlook the fear that’s...