Auld Jack Devine, as afternoon bows to the long shadows of a June evening, stands there, then, in the green and wet field, as they all are green and wet, appraising these Americans searching County Mayo for Jack Devine, clutching a damp ship’s manifest: Well. Aye. Ye found him. Auld Jack, eighty if a day, … More Irish Evening
It’s a Thursday in May after five when I swing into the Piggly Wiggly with two bikes on the back of my SUV, and the dog inside; The woman slicing my deli ham struggles with the wrapper on the summer sausage, limps like her hip is bad, too; she paces, trapped behind the glass cage; … More Crivitz Piggly Wiggly Philosophy
So Mercutio cried – and before and since and ever, the years start over in darkness, the face of the earth turned away from the sun; The calendar is a ragged thread of a winter sweater snagged on a fencepost nail; it’s a ball of yarn spooling out into the future, bouncing across the kempt … More Ask For Me Tomorrow And You Shall Find Me a Grave Man!
All the birds rise up/ fragments of lake taking wing/ undone, becoming.
I. On the way up to the lake house, the back of the vehicle jammed with things of this earth: snacks, casseroles, a snowboard, three pairs of snow pants, a snow shovel for the ice rink, skates, sleeping bags, water, wine – and after passing barn upon barn, acre upon acre of crumbling stone and … More 22 Years Later
Tonight we sleep above the ice, (cocooned like mousies in sleeping bags) under an impossible number of January stars, (brilliant like only winter stars can be, Orion hunting alone) over the lake, and the fish in the lake, (swimming slowly in the iced water capped by sixteen inches of ice) in this bitter cold, (as … More Night on Shakey Lakes, -17°F
That night it was snowing like crazy but we left the kitchen in disarray to pick her up and we drove through half-deserted white billowed streets to see the pretty lights at the botanical gardens I walked ahead so you could stroll alone with her through the winter night lit by imagined dragons, undersea creatures, … More Holding Fire
Winter reveals all the broken things you don’t see in the modest months, the tree snapped in half, a frayed thing, touching its forehead to the cold ground – cracked buckets and oblong strips of tires, outbuildings leaning perilously to one side as though they’ve had too many beers when really all they’ve had is … More Winter Reveals
While waiting for the Percoset to kick in, and the Spinal to bid goodbye, (thus far I can tense the muscles in my right thigh, only), so I can walk, and pee, and get home, and while trying to breathe out in a hiss through the cramping of my missing womb, (though to be clear … More Wee Thing
Either it comes to you Or you go to it; nevertheless You meet. Highway 139 weaves southward after your day of skiing; a newly teenaged girl watches a screen in the back, playing a movie meant for her younger self – the older brother left behind at the friends’ cabin, the eldest sister in a … More Drifting
Halfway North 