Improving the Office Art
I’ve worked enough winters under this black and white photo of branches and sky on a canvas wide as my stretched out arms. So I lift it from the…
Supermarket Pastoral
I saw a ground squirrel with a long naked tail in the wilderness behind the Stop & Shop where the brook rushes into the vortex of an abandoned dryer.…
Mistaken Identity
I look up from my grave-- I’m not buried, I’m building on the ground floor. I always intended to find something more than the right button for my coat,…
Four Years of Days
For seven years, on four of seven days I walked or biked or rode the subway to her real wood paneling and sat at first then lay so that…
Infant Boy 1895
I came into being unknown to myself, a small sac of seawater and soft bones. Time and memory had no meaning for me. Weightless hunger spidered with blood, I…
A Break with Specifics
A small space opens inside Tennessee, perennial-ready. At the last moment I manage to stay by the window, looking further. Whose body is that being sent back to ground?…
The Arborist
(for Seamus Heaney) With a two-handed grip, plunging the steel wand deep, there and again over there--the root web, he explains, as broad as the dogwood's crown, feeding…
Late Summer Elegy
Lately, I feel the days fly out into the dark trees and vanish. Without you whose love was air-thin and particular, I’m left these daughter-hands of bone that do…