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
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!
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
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
Maybe he’s driving the Jeep through the Vietnamese jungle strewn with tents and men trying to dry their socks and men trying to get the cigarette to light and men trying to tune in the radio signal and men trying to find the words to write a letter and trying most of all not to … More Inheritance
And shining in the green field As though they are just-painted models In someone’s miniature world, Set just So as We fly down 577 while Sun and rain leapfrog over each other, Empty houses, fallow fields, A woman pulling weeds In a rectangular patch Reclaimed from the wild, Destined for the wild In 40 years … More Black Horses Wet
Up, as the sun stretches lazily across the unmade bed of the Midwest and taps the Pacific shore, rousting the shore birds, up before they planned, before coffee, before mirror, up before their war paint and fences, they come out with leashes, wrinkled pajama pants, and flip flops that softly slap and whisper sleepy recognition … More Dog Walkers in Manhattan Beach
The year before the plane finally nosed into the frigid winter sky Was the slow grating scrape of a wooden match along the cold cement, Until I burst into a bright circle of flame; all else recedes in the Haitian heat; Tiny stuttering flames of Kreyol a flicking tongue against the landscape; (rutted and rock-strewn … More Match Girl
Halfway North 