Critique

Red Wolf Journal (Online) March 2016
Song Of Myself (RWJ Anthology) August 2016

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) March 2023

The mirror these days
winces
when it sees me.

Hard Going

Poetry Breakfast (Online) March 2016

I had considerable trouble leaving you.
It was car trouble, mostly: I wasn’t really
used to the standard, then, and it was
hard to find reverse; or hard to find it
fast enough anyway. Getting out of town
was no picnic either, with all that snow
piled up for blocks around the house,
the storm localized around the cold front
generated by your occluded heart.
I had to start running the red lights
because every time I stopped
people kept coming up to the car
asking me what took so long.
I have to admit this much, though:
when I finally got to the border,
even though I was running on empty,
I considered giving up and driving back.
But I only considered it briefly.

Disappearance

Front Porch Review (Online) January 2016

While you are away, I go out
into the sunless morning.
The door that closes behind me
closes forever.  The house is an echo
and the silent windows reflect
only the vacant, untended garden.
I have nowhere to go
but I get into the car and drive.

All the signs are stop signs.
People in the village stop, stare
as I pass, seeing only half of me.

Eurydice

Deep Water Literary Journal (Online)  August 2015

She goes to that dark land

of her own free will

and far too often.

 

She blames it on snakebites:

something inside writhes, closes.

Below, something opens

invites her in,  insists;

she does not resist.

 

In the morning, dazed,

apologetic,

she rises, stares

burning in the day’s light

she barely sees

then turns again,

descending.

 

I am no Orpheus

to follow her there.

I let her fall.

Breathless

Your One Phone Call  (Online) July 2015

There is neither edge nor precipice;
nor slide, nor knowable fall.
There is only bottom.
Lack makes itself known
abruptly, not losing or loss.
There is only nothing, suddenly.

There is neither flight nor flying
nor slipping away into airlessness;
there is no drag or drain, no
low warning, no looming alarm.
There is only bottom and nothing.

Revisiting Venus

Objects in the Rear View Mirror (Print Anthology) July 2015
Kind Of A Hurricane Press

               He leaves the hospital for the last time, unable to forget her face.

Half the country was locked in an arctic vortex that night, wind chill readings in the dozens of degrees below-zero, but he’d driven home—an hour’s drive over The Heights—with the window fully open, his hands frozen on the wheel, his eyes blinded, the radio blaring some almost incomprehensible ‘60s tune about love and a forever he can only just barely recall.

When he reached the top of The Heights he remembered how he’d once stopped at the pull-off on a mid-summer night, sat quietly for an hour staring up at Venus, and written a poem about a homesick Canadian dying to get home, flying across the median, sailing over the ditch, and crashing in flames into the granite embankment. After all the years of reading and reciting the poem, it had ceased to be a fiction. He never crossed The Heights without recalling it.

Now, years and years and half a year later, flying home, frozen, he forces himself to decelerate when the headstone grey granite, harder than mere rock, looms, beckoning.

Icarus, These Days

Anthology: Greek Fire (print) July 2015)
Lost Tower Publications

Morning: Icarus pursues a correlation
between a red hawk, gliding,
silent on a far dark horizon
and the first slash of sunrise,
dull fire before the day’s flames.
But everything intervenes:
meetings that haven’t
happened, that won’t happen
until after it's light, until after
it’s almost dark again;
the coffee that spills,
the words that don’t;
the pills and calls
and all the deadly needy
people, ready to be served,
waiting to be saved.

He’s an unwilling subject:
a wing he cannot grasp, an
image of small flame spread out
across a wide and empty air,
lifts him from sleep but leaves him,
breathless and parched, unable
to speak; drops him, speechless,
down among the boulders
of another desperate day.

Appraisal

Your One Phone Call (Online) July 2015


When you find me, here,
try to imagine me whole:

52 year-old meat, hairy,
leaning on my last leg,

grizzly, unbearable;
a spectacled sight. Behold

before you the aftermath
of a half-century of breath;

half a million hours, wasted,
spent like small change

on small changes. These days,
if you seek me here, here

you will find me, such as I am:
crutched and unbalanced, blinking,

a teetering relic, nakedly unearthed,
recently given to fits, recently,

when exposed to sunlight, stunned.

Empties

Your One Phone Call (online)  June 2015


I had to rescue my older brother once.
He called me after two years of no contact,

begged me to drive to his house, ask his wife
for the spare car keys, meet him downtown

in a bar’s parking lot.  He said he might be
passed out in the back seat.  I told him

I didn’t remember what his car looked like
but he hung up on me before I could ask.

Sure enough: passed out in the back seat
and not a single syllable of thanks.  It still

ticks me off, almost half a century later.
And I have this younger brother, keeps

looking in those same old bottles, looking
for something I know he’ll never find.

My older brother is his older brother, too;
everything I’ve ever seen, he’s seen.

You’d think he’d get the message.  No.

Red As A Bell

Local Nomad (Online) April 2015


Red as a bell
he thought
Red as a wagon
     redder than anger
     & wet
Thicker than water

Something buzzed
     startled by shadows
Particles of dust
centuries old
would not settle there

He turned the corner
in a glint of final steel
     foreign faces followed
There was a feeling
no one knew what to think
any more


Horizons away
Hollywood imagined it differently
Horizons away    
Mars was half swung round    
          in the midnight sky

The world was half asleep

Whistler's Annunciation

Red Wolf Journal (Online) March 2015

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) March 2023

Mister Whistler looms
down the gloomy street,
hoping to meet the morning
but limps himself back home
before dawn.
                        When the sun
comes scrambling up at last
over the staring and eggy town,
sleepy in its early kitchens,
all the yellow curtains
in all the yellow windows
burst into Sunday flames
and fall, burning the countertops
and leaving their feeble yellow ash
on Mister Whistler’s sad and
unswept morning floors.

Chase

Red Wolf Journal (Online) March 2015

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) March 2023

The old man scoops another
thin scrape of riverbank, dips
the rim to drown the till,
swirls the pan. Part of the dig
slips over the edge with every
circle. The murky water clears.
Sandy granite. Schist. A glint
of mica. The man looks up.
The sun is gold in a blue sky.
The man sits still, resigned.
He sighs; scoops; swirls; spills.
He wills himself to wait.

Sundress

Red Wolf Journal (Online) March 2015

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) March 2023

She thinks about how she looks,
about how she looks in a sundress;
puts it on and steps on out
onto Main Street, pushes her stroller
down past the Creemee stand
where the hunks hang out,
admiring each other’s tattoos
and planning their romantic assaults
on the wide-eyed waitress at the Valley House,
making bets on who among them is
most likely to get to second base first.

She knows she doesn’t stand a chance
of catching their full attention
or holding it very long, but she’s
hoping there’s enough breeze
to flutter her sundress,
lure at least one of them
into a second look, hold his eyes long enough
so that her red hair and lipstick
sends him a green light, tempts him to
come on over and chat her up.

But the stroller’s working against all that.
Sundress or no, lipstick or not,
she knows she’s made her bed;
she just doesn’t want to lie in it alone.

Anthropomorphism

One Sentence Poems (Online) February 2015


I saw my father cry
like a baby
once.

How Billy Writes A Play

Red Wolf Journal (Online) December 2014
Anthologized (Theme: Play) January 2015

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) March 2023

He chooses a theme and a pen.
The nib is crucial, especially
by the time he hits the third act
when he makes a fine point
on a dozen or so pencils for back-up.
He exposes the characters by stages,
methodically spilling ink on the script
here, blood in the storyline there, and
—as their hearts resolve themselves
from paper into flesh—he beats
them into submission, his manuscript
their master, his work their play.

Landscape Triptych

Canary (Online) December 2014
--Part 1 previously published (April 00) at New Works Review--

1.

Wheeled glossy-wing'd and black
Corvus Cornix, Corvus Corax
to Home in golden Tamarack
this cold day in space & sad
when the sun goes down these hills

Merge here wood & water
inland, hillbound streams
dreaming driftwood beaches
along the forested seaboard;
merge green & grey the conifer
and elm stands, gazing, down
where fine white waterlace
fans flat rockface & falls

               Melancholy in this mist land
               The Raven and The Crow


2.

               Two days back in Time
               Birds, massing:

Put wing to Northland air you riveted,
strung out & Against the sky:
pull Winter in behind you

Like a vacuum:
going, and nowhere.
Somewhere trees reach, waiting.

Cornfields standing, left, amazed—
frost light'ning stalks & leaves
(where air has touched with ice
the leathered scarecrow's fame)
the stillness of the moment

Flight Flight


3.

               Pinpoint: the Northern Star a sky away:
               Winter on these hills

Where the eye looks
upward, nothing moves—
above the landscape
nothing is moving through
still air

Bare these treelimbs in extreme
starlight, frostbitten in air.
What sun there is
is cold

Still this greatcoated space
under white inches of muffle

Empty these skies

Step Right Up

Red River Review (Online) August 2014

My Uncle Del, my father always said, could sell
an icecube to an Eskimo, a dozen pairs of shoes
to unwary legless vets; could sell, without a beat,
Beelzebub himself a heater and a book of matches
and insurance, too, just in case of fire.
                                                                My father
said my Uncle Del had paid his way through school
by getting fools to waste their time and lose their
thin and bottom dimes on crooked games of chance
they had no chance of winning.
                                                   And I don’t know
if all that’s true, or if my dad was selling me a bill
of goods about a relative I’d never met, and yet
it seems it might be true:
                                         When I was young, if
I had run to circus tents, if I were offered choice,
I knew what kind of circus work I’d choose. I’d use
my voice to rope the luckless suckers in; I’d stand
outside the tent and sing in praise of freaks. I’d get
the rent and every other cent the dopes could spend
to see the geeks and flipperkids, the tiny Raisin Boy,
the swallower of lengthy swords, the Fishface Twins,
then send them out to borrow more, if only just
to see the show again.
                                    I’d bark them in again, alright.

Valentine's Day

Blue Skirt  (Online) August 2014

Valentine’s Day               
(KFL  2/14/27 — 1/24/01)

No one goes there now.
For days the smooth snow,
unbroken to the treeline,
lifted there by wind
along the ridge, settles
at last among the stones.
At night, stars, high,
hiss an inaudible static,
dance for the dead.

In the morning,
if there is sun,
it washes down
between the stones,
lights but does not warm.
Cold reigns,
and I stand in the drift,
nearly ash among the ashes.

Seeing Margot

Deep Water Literary Journal (Online) August 2014

I see Margot two or three times a month,

tell her about my fear of being hunted,

being rounded up for running out of pills

in the middle of the night. Mostly, she

waits patiently while I caress my lies or

opt, instead, to spend my time describing

the things I find lying on the frozen lawn.

Sometimes when we talk I think about how

I left the other doctor high and dry, owing

him thousands of dollars, and I remember

saying goodbye to Trudy back on the ward,

watching me go and asking if I'd gotten the cure.

Yesterday I let my watch read 11:50 all day long.

Late in the morning, something like snow came

spitting down, overwhelming my wipers.

Crossing Main near midnight, I saw Margot

through the windshield. I wanted to get out

and tell her that I've lived before, tell her

that the exterminators are coming around

to gather us up, that I need to see her now

for an hour or so, need to have some coffee,

need to get and take my pills, go home,

scrape the baby off the frozen grass.



Clapboard House (3 Pieces)
(Online) July 2014

 

 

Getting It In Writing

 

Danny B. initials the dust
of the library’s basement window
makes his mark inside a heart with
his favorite girlfriend’s initials, pierces
 
his full and dusty heart with an arrow,
with angled feathers and a very serious
point; and despite all the books and
periodicals the institution offers, nothing
 
means more than these four letters
because Danny knows that tonight
after the slow dance, walking her home
in the dark under the feeble streetlight
 
he can stop and point to the window,
point to his dusty handiwork and hope
she overlooks the crack in the glass
and the fact that several other windows
 
all bear similar artifacts: his name
in dust in identically shafted hearts,
 
and his former girlfriends’ initials.
 
The girl’s not blind, she sees it all
 
but doesn’t care; she doesn’t care
the window’s cracked, doesn’t care
that half a quiver’s love is spent
on half a dozen other dusty panes.
 
She lets him make a pass, lets him
kiss her under the blazing streetlight,
and when the dust has settled she
goes back home, cracks a notebook,
 
fills a dozen empty pages with
Mrs Dan, Mrs Daniel, Mrs Danny B.

 

Grace

Thank you, father, for all that hash when I was
just a high schoolboy;  and for all those girls,
their cute little pink feet and silver toe rings
up on the dashboard, Stones on the radio,
calico dresses in the wind, tanned legs, hot
nights, warm flesh, and all those summer
sunstruck mornings waking up with no idea
whose house I was in, whose bed,
and not a second’s thought about how it’s
only Tuesday, smoky and unknowable.
Thanks for the moon reflected in windshield
raindrops, and for midnight mushrooms,
Day-Glo under blacklight, mescaline boogie,
acid rock,  and acid.  But mostly thank you
for ’68: Danny Riley and his floral necktie
finishing up his student teaching,
smiling and handing me books, saying
Oh man, you should read some Ginsberg, or 
Brautigan, maybe.  No; here, I got it.
For you, Ferlinghetti.

 

Wrong Hands

He doesn’t know how he let his hands
do the things his hands had done:
casually thrown away a wedding ring,
made a fist and used it, ransacked a
complete stranger’s home, plunged
a needle, pulled a trigger.
                                        It’s like they
were someone else’s hands; like they’d
never opened a book, never taken an
oath, never tucked a little girl into bed,
or stroked her hair.
                              Now, everything
had slipped away from him, left him
predictably alone, completely
empty-handed.

Haiku Stupid

High Coupe (Online) June 2014
Subsequently Anthologized: Storm Cycle (Kind Of A Hurricane Press) August 2015

1.

sixteen chickens cross

I curse the road for its width

stupid slowpoke birds

 

2.

they roll themselves down

stupid Pakistani socks
blame it on wal-mart

 

3.

stupid galaxy

we have nowhere else to go
stay home in the pits

 

4.

deadly golden arch

America malnourished
stupid plastic food

 

5.

turn the damned thing off
stupid reality shows
big ol’ bunch of dopes
  

Soon, Green

One Sentence Poems (Online) May 2014

Today in the notch, despite the mere scrim
of a mid-April snow, rainy flakes barely frozen,
falling, liquefied, through an early morning
mountain air, even the casual eye could catch
(captured in a momentary parting of fog)
the small grey buds of the red maple,
the low spark, purple flame of crocus.

rdp

All Things Considered

The Liberal Media Made Me Do It!
(Print Anthology April 2014)

Three soon-to-be grads from Harvard
or Sarah Lawrence opine on the morning
news how their Senior classes seem
simultaneously base and baseless
in light of their last three years abroad,
considering how, after all, once you’ve seen
morning in Jalalabad, everything golden
in the heart of the desert, everything wan
and wavering in the high desert heat,
everything else pales by comparison.
Or so they say, three young women
taking their last few classes, studying
The Modern Islamic Middle East, The History
Of Moorish Art, The Economics and Politics
Of Oil Producing Emirates As Reported In
The Western Press, Such As It Is.
One of them has perfect parents in
Prague, will go to live with them as soon as
the mortarboard is tossed in the air;
one of them is hoping for a career in
diplomacy, if she survives a military stint
and a battle for the civil servant’s desk.
The third is planning a family
just outside The Beltway, her most
immediate goal a gallery, small showings
on alternate Tuesdays, her house
only a mile or two away, jogging
distance, close enough to push a stroller
or walk a border collie, far enough away
to kid herself she’s got a life that matters.

 

Death Is Like The Floor

Right Hand Pointing (Online) March 2014

Death is like the floor

in a hotel’s tiled men’s room:
the one-by-one inch squares
that no one ever notices,
the hard repeated pattern
that no one ever notices
until a tile is missing
and it’s you.

Well

red wolf journal (online) February 2014

Red Wolf Editions: Visitations (Online Author’s Collection) March 2023

All the water we needed was
well below the glacial till.
Twelve gallons a minute, four
hundred feet down. Charlie
and his boys had to keep
changing the bit, making sure
the mud went down smooth, the
flush and cuttings came up
like they should.
                                Three
blistering days went by
before they hit anything
vaguely resembling bedrock;
three days of a grumbling crew,
the chaser truck shuttling
back and forth for pipe,
for Cokes and smokes and
general store hoagies, hotter
than sweltering hell and only
the middle of May.
                                Tonight,
two Mays later, I’m out on
the deck, an icy gin and tonic
reminds me it’s almost summer
again, Venus smiles down, farmboys
off in the distance, probably
drunk, have themselves a little
impromptu fireworks display,
either because they just got back
from Toronto, or because they’re
too whopping drunk to know it’s
not quite the Fourth.
                                Either way,
I’m waiting for you here
beside the well tonight, enjoying
the show from a distance; happy
as man lately lost in the desert
come in at last for something cool
to drink.

Cold Snap

Front Porch Review (Online) January 2014
--Originally appeared in Feb 2006 at Crescent Moon Journal

Outside for obligatory photographs:
ubiquitous head-shot, profile,
three-quarter profile, bust.
I stand between the battered, rusty
plow, lost in a stand of spruce,
and the house’s winter windows,
nearly buried by blizzard. I squint
and I will be squinting forever
standing, frozen by the shutters.

When I see myself, inside, later,
at first only pixels, then paper thin,
I am several hundred pounds of meat
none of it lean, leaning on a cane,
a lame spectacle trapped by
reflex and bifocality, with snow
at the temple of my thinning hair.

How To Know For Sure

egg (online) December 2013

3:47 AM
and still you can’t
without her there, sleeping,
sleep.

Company For Dinner

Bohemia (Online / Print) October 2013

Who could resist those gumdrop
eaves, those icing gutters, pink
wafer shutters and doors, shrubs
of spun sugar, those licorice windows
and that delicate black cracker chimney?
Who indeed. No one. Everyone
who stopped, even if only to visit,
however briefly, wished they could
call it home, wanted to possess
such a finely sprinkled chocolate lawn.
But sooner or later, sweetness fades:
inside, there’s only a blazing stove,
a blazing iron oven and a wicked and
starving witch, wishing she wasn’t
so always alone, wasn’t always so lost
in the deep and darkening woods,
far from her cat and her coven,
trying in vain to fill her emptiness
with a couple of wayward children
fattening in cages in the corner.

Thought For The Day

The Comstock Review (Print) October 2013

Although he did not have the time
to write it down or tell his friends
his thought for the day was this:
Nothing is ever where you expect
to find it.
                 He had this thought
as he balanced on the bed’s edge,
his feet sweeping circles in the dark
in search of his grey sweats, when
the massive clot dislodged, ran
its short course to the ventricle
and suddenly the room at 4AM
was bathed in beautiful light.

Song Of The Crystal

Northern Cardinal Review (Online) September 2013

Safe the harbor here
        where hardwoods creak
             in wind
               bend
        along the water’s edge
to kiss and mix
        their shadows;
to measure air
and mark the water’s reach.

Safe the haven here
        where streamlets, muttering,
           murmur secret histories
           of millrace, of millpond,
and of slightly shifted stone.

Safe safe safe
        where water falls:
        below the cliffstone
beneath a tree, beside a brook.

Hemlock, Sandalwood, Sage

Northern Cardinal Review (Online) Sept 2013

Today it’s hemlock smoke, or
cedar and, under thin clouds
and the huge blue, I’m on a
hillside, high, dreaming about
what summer used to be like,
how all the beautiful women
walked up and down the beach,
their brown eyes no darker
than their deep tans, the sun
not much brighter than their
smiles.
               And I remember that
once I could smell sandalwood
—or maybe it was sage—burning
in the distance on an autumn
afternoon; could hear the chant
of soft wind through sycamore,
the burble of a mid-day brook,
and I realize
                        I’ve been here
before, been here in all seasons:
when the sun baked the drying
grass; when the snow drifted
into the hollows between the
hills; when the first leaves
greened, or the last of them,
reddened, sailed earthward
on autumn-scented air.

Watch And Wait

Untitled, with Passengers (Online) September 2013
**Audio Link On Page**

 

A homesick Canadian, northbound,
approaching eighty-five or ninety
blasted past me in a thick fog
up on The Heights, swerved
across the breakdown lane, sailed
the ditch and collided with granite;
everything within seconds was aflame.
Nothing could be done. I could only
watch.

Even the ambulance, useless,

red strobes flashing near midnight,
arriving before the useless state police,
long before the merciful fire truck
lumbered up, could do exactly
nothing.

Almost a week went by.

I told and retold the story; told and
almost wept with each telling, each
detail etched clear as an August sky
lit by flame and stars: the streak of
tail lights diminishing, death in the air,
waiting.

I Got Yer "Grumpy" Right Here, Pal

Anthologized in Ekphrastia Gone Wild from Ain't Got No Press, (Aug. 2013)
(Originally published in And/Or (Inaugural Issue, November 2010)

I guess you’d be pretty grumpy, too
if you shared a crackerbox cottage
with six other chirpy little bastards,
up every day at the crack of dawn
with a merry Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho on their
lips, off to work after nothing but 
a meager bowl of gruel, carrying
pickaxes and a box of dynamite,
leaving behind such a rare beauty,
a fair-skinned brown-eyed princess 
to sweep up after them, make up
their beds, wash out their nasty
sheets, no one keeping her company
but a bunch of dopey bluebirds.
What a waste. 
                         And speaking of 
dopey, let me just say a few words
about a couple of the schmucks
I work with:
                       I busted a thumb
about a month ago and found out
Doc’s not much of a real doc; and 
I don’t know what it is that keeps
that nitwit Sleepy nodding all day
or Happy so friggin happy, but
sooner or later there’s bound to be
a cave-in and, frankly, I’ll be glad
for the time off.
                         Maybe then I’d 
get to hang around the house, 
see if the princess comes across 
with a little TLC. Now, that might 
improve my attitude some, eh? 

Go away now, you’re buggin me.

Persistence Of Vision

The Rapid Eye  (Online/Defunct) (Aug 2013)

She opens the fish,
finds her daughter's fingers inside;
every fish the same explosion.

 

Wordland (2 pieces)

Issue 3  (Online)  Apr 2013

Escapee

Gimme that she said, reaching for
her daughter’s wrist; the goddamn thing
cost seven bucks.Let me just…
But it was too late. The string had slipped
and the little girl was already afloat,
helium and Mylar in a perfectly clear April.


While You're Away, A Meteor Shower

Twice yesterday and overnight last night,
snow squalls and wind.This morning
the lawn was white.Hell of an April.
All day today, though, I imagined you
wherever you are (somewhere beside
water, I think you said) staring up at
the same clearing sky, the same blue as
the cold, distant ocean that called you
away.
          Tonight it’s clear: I’m alone and
the sky’s a dark crystal. Only a few stars
mar the dim silence; I’m standing here
staring up at the Lyrids (fine silver rain
of sparkle and flash from somewhere
halfway across the universe) thinking
only of you.
                   It’s already almost midnight
and the moon won’t show for at least
an hour, no sun rises until you return.

Farsi Love Song

litbomb (Online) April 2013

After a while, even though they’re singing in Arabic or Farsi, he swears he can tell what they’re singing about; swears this song’s about what it’s like when their lips meet in the dark, how it feels watching him walk out the door, off to join the army, not knowing how he’ll get by without her.

He’s had this same experience before, watching an Italian couple arguing in Italian in an Italian subway station: she was telling him he’s a dog—has always been a dog—and she knows there’s going to be some slut at the end of the line, waiting to meet him and let him take her home to her chintzy and flowered walk-up, let him kiss her on the balcony under the April drizzle, then take him inside, let him prove just how much of a dog he truly is.

All of this he understood clearly without a single word of English. Translation, he thought, was unnecessary, superfluous.

Now he sits and listens to the Farsi love song, laments the pace that others set for themselves, a pace that keeeps them from hearing the heartbreak, feeling the loss, sharing the shattered moment we all have to live through, sooner or later, in any language.

Firetower

Northern Cardinal Review (Online) April 2013

Everything under the sun
is lag-bolt and pressure-treated lumber;
everything else is outside, beyond far.
It does not reach.
Here, only the movement of grasses.
Here trees, breathing, rustle and whisper
openly secret secrets
only to nuthatch and thrush.

Not Quite Mud-Luscious Yet

Every Day Poets (Online) April 2013

This latest snow, I hope, will also be
the last.
             I wait for white to fade,
for drifts to drift away, for warmer
nights and longer days.
                                  I pray
for crocuses to come and go,
or an April shower of tulip blooms
and lollipop roses; for anything
that shows us that the sun is less
removed, is less remote.
                                     I hope
these bloomless snowy days are past,
this latest snow will also be —at last—
the last.

Late Snow, By The Numbers

The Orange Room Review (Online) April 2013

I spent the night, head filled with numbers and
dreams of numbers, and in the frozen morning
 --new snow on all the branches--I'm filled with
numbers still: readout on the oil tank, wattage
of the feeble lightbulb, what part of the pound
of coffee remains until I'm drowning in a sea of
numbers too great to reckon.
                                           Five new inches
of snow at the end of April, the month pretending
to be March, going out like a lion on all fours,
temps in the lower double digits. Five new inches
of snow, even though the moon has orbited the
frogpond almost half a dozen times already
since the new year's turn. Five new inches of
snow on the three or four places we'd reserved
for delphinium and columbine, for roses, lilies,
and various summer whatnot.
                                           All the world's awash
in white. April's almost over; I'm counting on May.

Two Small Threes By Five

(Haibun)
World Haiku Review (Online) March 2013

Irresistible— 
harvest moon after midnight
a haiku mandate

This is how it is for him. It’s pathetic, and even he knows it’s pathetic. He wakes up hours before daylight, fully awake with his self-imposed deadline ringing in his head: two small poems, three lines each, finished before breakfast; he just keeps thinking Two Small Threes By Five, over and over again until finally he gets himself out of bed to write them.

 

He thinks about where to start, takes the time to look up the phrase harvest moon—an antique phrase he’s vowed never to use in his writing—but the moonlight’s just so very present, flooding the window, shining on his desktop, and illuminating his keyboard that he feels the need to check it out and be certain. Sure enough:  a harvest moon, shining on.

 

After the first three hard-won lines, he hits the pre-set audio and the Sandhya Raga floods the room. He’s out of incense. He’s afraid he’s out of ideas. He walks to the kitchen, makes the coffee by moonlight, steel strings still ringing in the darkness:Raga Of The Harvest Moon. He looks out the window.

 

absolute perfect moon

coffee moon keyboard moon raga moon moon
haiku moon, release me

Charlie

*82 Review (Print & Online) March 2013

Charlie visits the Precious Savior
Bookstore, stocks up on all the latest
offerings: Ticket To Heaven postcards,
sticks of incense, The Greatest Hits
Of The Grateful Faithful, featuring
the Certain Resurrection Choir.
He goes for a walk on Water Street,
his head and headphones buzzing.     

Charlie folds himself into a corner,
contemplates nations murdering
nations. He no longer aims or claims
to be a general; thinks instead about
suicide, rain, and the sidewalks, running.
Smoke rises near the airport, insubstantial,
like a ghost rises from a cooling corpse.
Charlie, airborne, cools his heels, thinks about
jets and vapor trails.   

Back home, he’s got a fan
and a paint-by-number Jesus.
At night they find a little harmony:
the fan spins around and
the room spins around and Jesus,
pleased, lets Charlie go to sleep.    

Tutor

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (Online) October 2012
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (Print) March 2013
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (Audio) May 2013

The trick, he said, is to sit
by the lake, write about water
and sky without using words
like expanse or dome; without
comparing one to the other;
without mentioning robin’s eggs
or azure; without resorting to
a recollection of other summers
spent by some other expanse
of azure, under some other
dome of robin’s egg blue.
The trick, he said, is to see
across the lake to the other
shore; to make the other shore
anything at all but distant; keep
the clouds from becoming cotton.

Fly Away Home

Poetry Breakfast (Online) October 2012

While you’re away this time,
and because I can never sleep
when you’re gone, I’ve had to buy
a big old sack of potatoes
to balance out the bed.
It’s not the same thing, really
but I have to admit: it’s not too bad.
Sorry about the sheets.

That meatloaf you made
before you left for the airport
lasted almost half a week,
then I just started ordering
pizza and Chinese take-out.
While I waited for your return
I carved a pumpkin. I tried
to make it happy, but it just
wouldn’t smile. Nobody came.

This morning it’s just me,
up early as usual, with
Jack Nicholson, Five Easy Pieces,
and the lovely Susan Anspach.
She, too, has beautiful hair.
I miss you terribly. Please try
to make it home for Christmas.

Bring me someone’s autograph.

Whither Thou Goest

Poetry Super Highway (Online) April 2012
(14th Annual Yom HaShoah--Holocaust Remembrance--Anthology)

Again the dream: the boxcar and the
long march. The camp. Last night, again,
selection and weeping. Ash in the air.

Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me if
I miss someone I’ve never met, I
don’t. Except in dream, I was not

there to bear witness; was not there
at all. I don’t believe I’ve ever met
anyone who had to let their lover go

or let their father or their mother go
—I must have; must have met them,
but I can’t recall.

...........................This morning, though,
it seems I know them all. It seems I
stand beside them, waiting in long lines,

waiting in the cold on hard red ground,
surrounded by even harder faces, late
winter snow and traces of ash in the air.

Catching The Dalmatian

egg poetry (Online) April 2012

Just before he wakes up he reaches
for another jumbo shrimp. The cooler,
nearly depleted, is a mix of slushy bait
and warming beer. He snags one or
the other –he’s not sure which—
and wishes the odd lights at the bottom
of the dark pool weren’t so…what?
Hypnotic? Inviting? He sips his beer,
stabs another jumbo on the barbed
hook, flicks his ash and, with a flick
of wrist, casts the weighted bait.
A plop and a wait.
                            Half in the bag,
it’s hard to tell how long it takes
to finally sink to the bottom.
He’s had better days, he thinks;
he’d like to think that better days
are still ahead, but the bottom
of the pool beckons.
                               A sudden tug.
He jerks the rod to set the hook.
His head reels; “Dogfish,” he thinks,
“Or something worse,” and cuts it
loose. He lights another smoke,
reaches for another beer, watches
the neighbor’s spotted dog
squatting on his August lawn.

Heart

right hand pointing (Online) March 2012

It's not convenient now, is it,
having one that breaks, daily;
having one that fails.
When I heard you on the phone
I almost escaped knowing your voice.
Here, the leaves are changing;
out on your flats there is fog
and little or nothing to do,
nothing to be done.

Curio Poetry (3 Pieces)

Curio Poetry (Inaugural Issue, Online) Dec 2011

By The Dozens

He kills as many as he finds, throws them
into the wheelbarrow. Their bloody eyes
stare up at him in astonished adoration,
freed at last from the earthly burn of air,
dust in the lungs, not enough to eat ever,
always running away from everything,
terrified. They seemed to anticipate
the fall of the ax, the swing of the hoe
or the heel of the boot to come down
on their fragile skulls and the sudden
long silence that followed; seemed almost
to look up, welcoming, as the end,
once it was inevitable, approached.


Sunset Over Oakwood Park

All day long, in the sunlight: the park.
The shadows shifted, lengthened,
made green greener where I rested
in the shade, cooled, lulled, heavy-lidded,
longing to lie on the grass an hour longer
under the influence of birdsong
on the best of possible April days.
At last the long shadows merged,
stretched to the farthest edges of the park,
the tops of the oaks caught a fleeting fire,
the darkness deepened, the sun
became a final sliver of gold, and was gone.


Sign-Off

I’ve had enough of that, he said,
pressing a button, ending the newscast,
putting an end, finally, to the useless
bombing of sand dunes and babies.
Then, half-reclined against the bedrail
he pressed another button, turned up
the morphine drip to maximum, closed
his eyes. I’ve had enough, he said.

Ventriloquy

Every Day Poets (Online) Dec 2011

What time did you
come to bed she asked

and when he told her
midnight she said

too late, too late,
you’re always up too late

and he could hear
in her voice

his doctor’s voice
his mother’s voice

the clarion voices
of his guardian angels

The New Echolalia

Every Day Poets (Online) November 2011

Whatever I ever say to her
she repeats back perfectly.

I think you’re beautiful, I say;
she tells me I should trim my beard.

I tell her how much I love her.
She reminds me to take my pills.

She gives me a kiss
when I bring her coffee.

On A Wire

Front Porch Review (Online) April 2011

Under their wings is white:
early in the morning, early
in autumn, birds, perched on lines
give new meaning to the words
‘the birds alight.’ Birds in search
of one last brightness, one last
dream of summer flight, gleam.
Spied from below, the underside
of wings is white, flares like the last
flash of another summer, undone
by autumn’s shortened light.