Author: admin

Remember last April when stepping outside meant entering an idea made of lilac until a surprise thunderstorm broke the youngest trees to the ground, even then life thrashing against itself? Now it’s winter, nothing to fight or...

Startles you, a pan dropped, a mug you put down too hard on the counter, your own steps to open the noisy refrigerator. Did you think there was a calm you could carry into this house? Even the most quiet of places, an old moss...

The blond fields bunch up in the speed of the cold window as I tilt toward sleep but look! The wingtip of a hawk, a fox rushing underground into tomorrow. When I was five, I jumped chair to chair over a concrete floor and...

Oh poetry—you lonely, strange craft! When I look at what I’ve done these last years— my poems—these last, dark, frightful years— I feel my gut clenched in hot despair. Every poem longs to cry farewell as all falls away.        ...

They say it’s your final illness’s final hour— Oh take me with you into that bodyless light! You said the Angel of Death touched your cheek, brushed you with his wing, then rode the air —that great hawk, poised on the mastered...

I’m an old poet, old—far too old to share your youthful plans for power, success. My task is different. Mine is the poet’s task: to bring beauty about—to summon the taste, the smell, the very feel of that stranger—ah! that...

To my late wife Anna Belle Is it a year now past? One year you’re gone? Your wounded life now gone one endless year? Is it a year I’ve paced these empty rooms mumbling it’s best you’ve gone and left your pain behind and left...

She brought home apricots A sun within each glowed through warm hued like terra cotta or red ombre She’d put them in a white bowl for us Gathered mustard flowers sautéed the greens The pollen dusted her mahogany colored skin...

Inverted parasols of anemones in Tuscan fields Scarlet epaulettes on the blackbird’s wings Crimson of the dress to catch the eye of that boy at the party Heard my younger sister in her room scream She’d pushed down on the trash...

What else is the purple gold of the fig’s skin A rare koi or two The opaque amethyst in my childhood ring The last moments of an August sunset off Pacific Northwest islands Seen at the aquarium with its round right eye and...