If we were still in the old world, the six-weeks ago one, right now a girl with a make-up pencil might be standing before you with a mock frown – “stand still!” she’d say, drawing crow lines on your face, not crow’s feet, but lines to make you look like a crow, so you could … More There is no Wizard
And it’s the beginning of the end of the world – the regulars are turned out of the taverns, red-faced and singing defiantly, swaying and carrying their jackets under their arms into the almost-spring night, leaving behind the warm beer-sign bubbles, the cracked cheer of the bartenders, the pilsner philosophy of their fellow compatriots holding … More The Lights Flicker Once, Last Call in Suamico
We do not speak of the outside world – we whistle at the sun nosing around the fraying stratus clouds, lifting and dropping golden rays that splash our ankles and the winter-dead grasses – we call out to our dogs sniffing one another in turn, then exuberantly rolling in the dead carp that the bald … More By Tacit Agreement, Sunday at the Sensiba Trail
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)
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
‘Round the ankles of the birches autumn water gathered, murky – winter held it down til frozen cradled gently in the hollows – skirts of ice surround the low limbs stopped mid-fling by frigid wind embroidered not in poodle, plaid, suspended there, upended, glad – wee peeping frogs, asleep, adorn a petticoat of moss and … More When They Finally Wake in April
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!
I. After we see paintings of the sea, and moonlight, and doom by Winslow Homer, after we work on income tax forms and insurance and eat carnitas burritos and watch Netflix, I don’t feel well, it’s not a bellyache or a hangover or a fever or something that CVS can fix. it’s like this existential … More Wes and Jesus Come up Empty
