Category creative writing
The poet snaps out of it
A red snapdragon I did not plant tumbles from rough rock soft rounded lobes offering themselves to the rugged world how readily beauty dazzles when it does not care who sees a poem I think and then the butcher’s knife drops from the counter pierces my foot so deeply so cleanly cleaving the flesh as […]
How tiresome to be solid
the stubborn insistence the ceaseless assertion the perpetual collisions sixty percent liquid some variable amount gas and still we do not move aside do not go around do not flow nor mingle we are rigid as rock On my favorite day which has not happened we become insubstantial unassuming as ghosts we are indistinct interstitial […]
Food chain
If you feed wild birds long enough, you begin to feel as if you are doing something important. Especially during the winter, when the mercury flirts with zero and every natural food source is blanketed in snow, the birds come to depend on your largesse. In return, they reliably offer pleasures only sporadically available in the realm […]
High Sierra
The last heist ends as you knew it would: Roy Earle tumbling from the high sierra. His weeping woman; his crying dog. But before that, love, for which Palance and Winters are too pretty, too well-fed; even in CinemaScope even in Warnercolor love needs Bogart and Lupino, their small desperation, the sharp angularity of his […]
Already
Already squirrels courting on the maple’s bare branches chasing, tumbling, wild and determined as teenage boys while my old hen sings softly the ancient song of her kind approaching again the nest box long empty which I cushion now with clean straw, feeling her feel the eggs soon to come, how already they speak to […]
God sleeps in
Having labored through the night to extinguish the day’s wickedness, God sleeps in that you might awaken at just the right moment in the liminal space between adjudged sins and feel, fleeting, the world made new — its wild and profligate beauty — the innocence of flesh upon bone the softness of the unguarded heart the […]
Offering
Each day I leave my offering — a roasted peanut unsalted unshelled — at the threshold of the squirrel’s home a gesture of goodwill and gratitude for another day in which I might recognize God’s proxies and walk then to the running track where this morning I […]
Embodied
Nothing is wrong and nothing right one of those days I occupy my body like an exile in a foreign land afraid to eat exotic food to drink untested water to hear too keenly the strange tongue of my inner workings soft and unintelligible billions of cells living and dying ceaseless and invisible the quiet […]
Journalism
Who we weren’t, when it was too painful. What we got wrong, all of it. What really happened. Maybe. Where the dead gather, quiet at last. Where we were, before. When frost embellishes the plainest object, as if beauty were actually everywhere. Why running deer seem to float and flying insects quiver, why time speaks to […]
Meditatio Ephemera 