Author: admin

Her hair cascades
from a slim barrette,
her smoke dancing
to the ache of a minor key.

Your thousand secret selves
live in this room,
hidden in plain sight:

She wanted you to look at things: a pile-up of clouds,
Sunset transmutations, ribs of boat-like magnolia leaves,
Intricacies or simplicities of shells, almost weightless
Outgrown June-bug bodies. Nature, in short.
Anything outside ourselves.

Until one day with work progressing
Soul does glisten near perfection
Not quite there the Blacksmith reckons
Put back in the fire again

Ashoka told his story everywhere:
on rocks, pillars, iron columns,
and what he wrote startles even now.
Waging war, he admitted,
was a mistake.

The hummingbirds
arrived in our backyard
again this summer,
stopping to refuel
on their long flight south.

My father rages at time and fate,
wrestling with the angel of bandages,
burning the forge of his dying heart,

Tsu-jan Literally meaning self-ablaze, it is what I experienced standing in the riverbed of Cushman Brook that summer of drought those twenty-five years ago, my Labrador standing on the banks, curiously watching me, tilting her...

weeps over the humid air at twilight,
a shallow creek meanders across town,
while small, white butterflies dissolve into
terminal nothingness—a cicada husk