Emily as the Lavender Irises Burst
Cedar-bound & watching the sky lose a battle to Emily’s carving, I am lightning working a way through the wood & chasing her colors as they take over the night.
Read MoreIsolation in a Passenger Car
I descend from the higher Rockies to Deer Lodge, very much the high plain. At 3 miles sun reflects from a window. The land coincides in its one identity, except this window soon to bounce its light to dialectical dark of the cosmos. Personally I can not challenge the sight. Greedy for the compensations of space, I refuse to broadcast my fugitive fantasy of my isolation at rest in a passenger car. But for beauty, I rue my caterpillar pace slowed on my itinerary, too short of...
Read MoreI Could Be Charlemagne
I could be Charlemagne. If I examine the plat, Lines and measures survey So many feet from here to there, Staked with orange, florescent paint, My realm of house, yard, wood, This soil, the worms, wasps, rabbits, These wildflowers, my vassals, Courting deferentially each summer, These trees, all bow to me. Absurd! Actually, the wind Possess these boughs — the wind, Pillaging the scene of the Pacific, Conquering the Rockies and Sierras, Marching cyclones across Nebraska. During calm days of respite, The wind away invading Appalachia, I could be Charlemagne, My reverie of sovereignty...
Read MoreRiparian Life
The grass crackled and frozen looking like sand and salt in the Egyptian desert, the source of natron that preserved the eviscerated and brain-hollowed bodies of dead pharaohs, still draws down a gaggle of Canada geese who must remember the site and near river of life much shorter than the Nile but sustaining enough even in the tired and soiled days of February for those beaks that peck and webs that stride upon last year’s vegetation that will renew without a weighing of heart against feather by Anubis, the jackal-head, so the big birds don’t have to worry their mortal...
Read MoreIf We Lived Together
If we lived together, you would nick your chin on a regular basis, confusing my razor with yours, because I am more enamored of smooth legs than I am of ineffectual, pink girly-girl razors. If we lived together, I would lie awake until you fell asleep, then slide quietly from under the covers to turn the thermostat up five degrees, because I grew up in an ungodly-cold house and I swore that someday, I would be toasty-warm and sleep in the nude. If we lived together, you would bribe me with a foot rub to stop my chatter so that you could listen to the nightly news. If we lived...
Read MoreMama’s Boy
The day I found out my mother had cancer I knew it before they even spoke. There was something — I still can’t name it — something to the silence after the ringing stopped. My father’s “Hey Bud” lacked the usual enthusiasm. For twenty minutes there was only medical jargon, recitation of statistics. And in the pauses in between I could feel her, as only a mother could, worrying only how I’d take the news. When we were done, she told me she loved me, I replied in kind, and that I knew it would be okay. It’s always been like...
Read More