Don’t try it. If you try to sail by poetry, you are lost. You will wash up on shore 10 days after you drown, face down with a spavined copy of Keats’ poems in your back pocket, your heart a stone that does not burn, instead of gliding into a harbor with the late afternoon … More Shelley Sailed By Poetry
Consider the fullness, the halfness, the bare dented space on my ring finger as I hold the pint, the sun and the foam sliding down the insides of my glass. O regard the Great Pandemic! The maskers and the anti-vaxers, the moats we’ve dug around ourselves – it’s far from over, but nevertheless when I … More Behold This Pint of Oatmeal Cream Ale
Early evening sun/ Caught under the arches/ Words stuck in my throat
And they fall to earth in Northern Wisconsin – Pembine, Antigo, Lakewood – I know how they feel, wings coated with ice, heavy, so heavy the loons can’t lift them one more time and, realizing it is out of their hands, or rather, out of their wings, the only thing to do is pick a … More News Item: Loons’ Wings Ice Over
A few miles past that fucked-up intersection coming off of the Chicago Skyway – the toll booth, the gaping hole in the road, the circle left and then allemand right demanded by some depraved square dance caller – I-65 shakes off the big city and, like any good Midwesterner makes a good and straight line … More Untraveling
Leafless butler trees/ Serving up platters of sky/ Our bellies growling/
That I am going to walk through today with a stranger has more rooms than I need and needs more money than I have and I don’t need all that space now but it is old and has a wide porch that looks over the Fox River, flowing north, and it has enough room for … More The House on Monroe Street
this blustery March afternoon I’m crossing what is still my back yard for a time drill in hand, a spile, a bright blue bag – 38 degrees, sandals skirting dried dog poop among brown leaves that fell, bright, the autumn before; the hole on the underside of the spile, yesterday confounded me but the sap … More Sap, Rising
Slips and skips from the lips, it frees me from this bees’ nest wherein barren technology stings and wrings joy from the days, it plucks me from the luckless hum of air conditioning and fair renditions of elevator tunes and spoons me into the bracing air heart racing there and the snow falling, flakes enthralling … More Friluftsliv
Takes me in its teeth, it’s a sleek wolverine shaking off glassine beads of the setting sun, gleaming over the river cold and clean; Riverine carries me in its furling current; my soul adamantine, unchanging, always changing, the lean walleye and muskies now follow me, hollow seems what we leave upstream, the tangerine sun bleeds … More Riverine
