Category Archives: Poetry

While I have sufficient opinions on the management of every aspect of life, I’m afraid I will never get the opportunity to run the world according to my designs because I am always discombobulated by the coming of morning. While … Continue reading →

As a young reader I was strongly bitten by poems such as “We Are Those People” by Robinson Jeffers, and novels like “The Man in the High Castle” by Phillip Dick. The darkness and chaos of the last few years … Continue reading →

The geese and the leaves, the last few weeks before winter conquers all have always been tinged with melancholy for me. Veterans Day commemorations conflate in my mind with the autumn Moratorium days during the Vietnam War when we marched … Continue reading →

Reading Michael Pollan has reoriented my brain a little as regards who’s the boss of me. He reckons a mysterious vegetable intelligence has been breeding us all the while we have been breeding plants. We are symbiotic in ways we … Continue reading →

In the last few years, objective circumstances have not been particularly joyful, and yet joy breaks through regardless. That is because joy has nothing to do with circumstance. Looking at Light Pain carves deep so the body might survive. Clear … Continue reading →

My night vision is getting too poor to enjoy this form of meditation from the driver’s seat, but there is a special form of peace to be had running down a smooth empty highway in the middle of the night. … Continue reading →

Somehow I never managed to share this poem from “Light Year” on Facebook or in this blog. I come back to it now because it is central to the themes of my work-in-progress, “The Other Village,” a volume of poetry … Continue reading →

During this time of seemingly non-stop bummers, of disease and unease, dreary with fear, a little drop of joy can feel like a revolutionary act. Into High Country When I head up into high country my doubtsstay back in the … Continue reading →

I have long used a hand-colored detail of the so-called Flammarion engraving as a visual identifier for my website and for my nascent publishing company, Liberty Street Books. But I have never before written an ekphrastic poem using the piece. … Continue reading →

I’m a little behind the season with this. I kept going back to it, revising, revising revisions, dropping stanzas, rewriting the closing more than once. Now bluets, daffodils, and hyacinths are blooming too, in the churchyard and around the village. … Continue reading →