While I waited there
in the terminal at Newark,
I spotted something
out of the corner of my eye.
It was a bird flying back
and forth along the ceiling,
and because I was
in an airline […]

Peace Offering
I still don’t know what to do
with the jacket hanging in my
closet. It’s not that old but like
a Brautigan novel is out of fashion.
Maybe it all comes down to math
and how for the first tim […]

—for Nicole Marie

She asked me to stand by her side,
But I wanted to see it all
Because I knew that I’d forget—
Even as hard as I’d want to remember—
The brunt and the bitter
Forcing my son in […]

Once the Thunder Stops

and it’s safe to venture out, we walk
to the end of the drive, out to the road,
through the mire & torn branches.
The smell of our wood fire mingles

with eucalyptus. We have only t […]

Mountain spruce
on upward slopes:
their pale under-blue
unwraps the clouds
in their slow round
of visiting.
We taste tracery
of strange soaps
on our skins. You
turn towards me,
awake […]

Twin sisters Fuchsia & Diamond,
twins in the sense they matured
in the same kiln, not expelled
from one womb, dance to punk
band A Testament Of Youth,
Tuesday night, Dugan’s Deli,
Iowa State U […]

Men croon
playful puns about you.
Men legislate, fix
your tan tunic
and wide bulb
with geography.
Men say your sweetness comes
from the soil,
comes from a depression-era accident
from a patch of sandy […]

Corsets of snow belly-bust traffic in Chicago,
mercifully blurring the blocky derangements
of Mies van der Rohe’s window arrangements.
You look from Floor 23 down at Michigan Avenue,
wax maudlin for a p […]

For the seventh time I have pierced
My heart, bleeding and beating
Autonomous of my rib cage.
Yet despite the pain,
My tears are gilded on a face
Lily white
And no matter how I am pierced
I still think the […]

Nature itself is meaningless; it is only as we interpret it that it has meaning.
John Canaday, What is Art?

In our side yard a walnut grows. Higher than the house, it is 104 inches in circumference at chest […]