Sometimes you are hauled backward before you can move forward; you get on a plane in the dark in Nashville and head south to Atlanta before touching down in Milwaukee where someone you love waits in the sleeting rain to drive you back and pour you into a warm, flightless bed. Sometimes the moon draws … More The Insufferable Logic of Tides
October rain ebbs and flows and falls and falls and falls on the crooked pine trees and the roof, on the old swing set and the black driveway, on the cold, wet burn barrel and the American flag at the hundred year old house on Shady Lane where my parents live still. In the basement, … More The Disobedience of Rain
A pied-billed grebe has already paddled madly halfway across this cove (its crested head sporting a half-hearted mohawk, its body a sputtering vector moving toward the northwest, Lake Superior swollen like a too-observant eye) before I realize that it has darted out from under this porch that hangs over the water where I stand holding … More Somewhere, Another (The Pied Billed Grebe)
Overcast skies cast over / this lake, my unquiet mind / the fish dart away /
When I look over my shoulder to change lanes on the Leo Frigo bridge high above the bay, I see her reaching over to smooth his long hair – my son’s girlfriend – and it’s as though he’s been cracked open and I’ve seen his heart beating for the first time. It’s crowded, so we … More Night Market
Three generations of monarchs unfurl their wings right where they emerge, dazed, to mate for hours while the world pitches and yaws, dusk to dawn – six weeks spent locked in an off and on fluttering embrace, drifting in circles of lazy lust just along overgrown highways of the driftless area (Trempeleau, Pepin, Eau Claire) … More The Fourth Generation of Monarchs Remember the Future
That afternoon at the cabin we sat by the river after I had cut up those small trees that you dropped at my feet with the tractor – (an offering, a challenge, one that I tore through haphazardly with the new chainsaw, black and yellow like a drunken, terrible bumblebee). It was quiet after all … More The Nest (Or, a Father Considers the Odds of Raising Successful Small-Mouth Bass Offspring)
I. Shady Lane barefoot at twilight we play Ghosts in the Graveyard vanishing in dark II. Rook cards slap on the porch after-dinner Manhattans kids drunk with freedom III. Beckoning June is ever-dusk fireflies wink in gangly grass as I pedal home
Outside in the drizzle of spring, green, green is the grass – lilacs are tiny purple fists waiting to unfold to again welcome May – once more trotting out its new beginning- with sweet applause; Inside, the window is cracked because of the paint, and you, at the far end of 16, stand without a … More Falling Stars
Two months shy of a century ago, it’s been raining in France, great sheets snapping like sodden flags across the farmer’s field – And my grandfather’s father, a child of German immigrants, sits down in soldier’s boots, and looking at the crops with a farmer’s eye, writes a few lines to his brother in Barnesville, … More Vire-en-Champagne, April 1919
Halfway North 