It’s the melancholy tail end of summer, a Wednesday night with waning light when I walk into the basement meeting room of the fire department on County Road 342. It smells like 50 years of bureaucracy and a musty bathroom and my claustrophobia tells me there is only one exit but I sign my name … More At The Mellen Township Board Meeting
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
Cathedral pines rock – in this ocean of green waves – I roll through and drown.
Five-thirty’s afternoon light fades from the Menominee where this water bug zig-zags northward over the glassy sturgeon-black surface of the river; a needle pulling threads of silver-speckled sunlight together, close as lovers, stitching a narrow pocket into which I slip secretly the ruins of another unmatched summer’s day.
Cumulus alligator drowses in the lake of the summer sky – dreaming of wings to fly by
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
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
Soft lies the light on the fern in the wood; still lies the love that we had, that we could – Long creep the shadows among grass-green blades; grave is the tongue that once held faith – Slow arcs the moon across the cold, starry, sky; steady beats my heart ‘til I die, … More Lies the Light
Halfway North 