It is 1929. The moon falls on the floor, the pantry is empty, beans hardening like rocks in the cans. No, you did not expect this. The same cracked wall with its stains, odor of your mother’s cleaning fluid, curtains with their clean hems, blowing in and out. You touch the bones and lumps of…
Like the profile of a man who waits To be arrested at dawn. If not this night, well then, Some other night soon. The small suitcase already packed, The family long dispersed, One sits fully dressed With the ashtray, the clock, the quiet. Then, the inexplicable shave: The face in the slanting mirror Lit by…
The pine floor looses its last green to the hands of the woman beside me. She takes small stalks — heal-all and aster — to sketch in the evening, of this, the first day of a fast fading October. Only then, slowly searching the underbrush, do we sense the ordered row of quartz markers and…
—Port Townsend, Washington I go down to the beach with its lengths of kelp, one with a holdfast clutching a pebble. It doesn’t matter how small it is, the harbormaster says, it does the job. I don’t miss you so much. I’m surprised. Maybe it’s because the sky is always changing, cumulus to stratus, stratus…
September cooling to October stops the throat with a doughy phlegm; a hundred years ago “lung fever” killed thousands, left the rest to cabin fever — then, for whoever emerged from that white chrysalis: spring. Dying, my grandmother took an interest in migration, tallying species at the hospital feeder. I almost believed the evening grosbeak…
If only I could tell you how wildness-shows the space between us and the green world; how an island is the same island with our presence, but with that presence we lose some hope of seeing, say, a horse, or the dead gnarled limbs of an oak sunk in sand. Edward Weston saw it in…
Once started nothing stops but for moment breath’s caught time stays patient.
You plummeting shards of the darkness, You rising stars in the light still Fumbling for the rickety trellis Of morning, your suddenness fills The whole unsteady air with whirring Where we awaken quiet together, Breathing soundlessly, no least stirring While your wingbeats alter the weather Of daylight arriving beyond The window, quick-feathered rushing And calling…
All-sufficing person come alive again! Light’s at attention — polite at the end of the sea. High gold & celibate, a bold celestial glare — Here. Sharks in the pines, the park shines. This isn’t the only time. Once before you stood on a hill of sand — wind in your child-like hair — blowing,…
Spring 2016 - Print 
Fall 1998 - Digital