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
I stand a moment in the space you left, while summer air curls through the windows wide – I, reconciling, make the empty bed, the sun lies on the laundered sheets and sighs; Your desk, your chest, your closet – clean and spare, these books have all been read, the records played – the things … More Leaving for College in a Year Marked by Plague Calls for a Sonnet
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
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
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)
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
Lulu and Nana are drafts; edited before they are published, in secret, He is bent over translucent twins in a cabin by the fire while snow skims the sky outside, He takes his red pen and his scissors named CRISPR and he snips their DNA here and then there like a gloved boxer making … More He Defends Gene Edited Babies
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
Halfway North 