These steady lake waves come near like a dog teasing with a stick – roll up to our pedals, retreat, roll, retreat, while we crash with nubby tires down the thin spine of beach, the heaving water to the east a balm, a coolant, a passage, a lifter-up, a dragger-down, a dark and silent grave. … More Interstitial
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
When I pull onto Sunset Beach Road in the purple twilight, a couple is already standing entwined in front of their truck, tail lights pointed at Lake Michigan, peering into the western sky; I am not the only one who thought to watch from the bay. Do you see anything? they ask, without preamble, as … More Waiting for Comet Neowise
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
On the last Saturday of my 40s, I drive alone to Fish Creek to take the Sunset Bike Trail at Peninsula State Park. It occurs to me as I review the map, then fold it into small rectangles and put it into my back pocket, that if I live to be 96, it’s a decade … More 9.6 Miles in September
One common tern hovers high above Lake Michigan, then dives under the waves and back again, its path a ragged stitch from sky purpling like a bruise into water smooth as a mirror, and then back to sky again, pulling together heaven and earth like the closing of a weary eye.
‘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
All the birds rise up/ fragments of lake taking wing/ undone, becoming.
Halfway North 