Tag Archives: Poetry

Winter Light

God scrubs up, aims her beam sharp and low –
Everything looks magnified, pinned down tight
On a white board – all her squirming specimens,
Shining bright.

The sun, sticking to the inner lanes –
I skim my life’s condensed version
Through the leafless window panes,
Already time for day again.

A starving fire in the west,
Cinders shrinking into ash –
These shorter days make darkness bolder.
Its shadows stretch, touch my shoulder.

(First published in slightly different form in Deronda Review Vol. 10 No. 1. Thanks to the editors.)

All I Can Hear Tonight

All I can seem to hear tonight
Are Dylan’s fingers squeaking on the strings,
The quartet’s grunts and sniffs
As they wrestle with Beethoven,
Alfred Brendel humming along
With a Schubert sonata,

And all I can seem to hear tonight
Is the train rumble under the cellist’s feet,
Pigeons making noisy love in the rafters
While the sopranos launch below,
Miles Davis telling Teo to play that back, Teo,
Teo, play that back,

And Teo plays it back,
The fumbled chords,
The false starts,
The traffic noises,
And a laughing Robert Plant tells Jimmy Page no
Leave it, yeah and they left it and
I’m hearing it all tonight,
It’s all I can seem to hear.

(First published in slightly different form in Alternate Route #10, Summer 2023. Thanks to editor Michael Starr.)

Pulling Weeds

A slow turn of the wrist, the skin of the earth rips
With a whisper of tearing canvas, dozens of tiny fingers
Unwilling to let go, branching into the lung diagram
From your oncologist’s office, sometimes an earthworm
Squirming in the shuddering root ball, dying of sunlight.
Holding so much desperation, such clotted will to live
Returns me to the foggy chaos of the calving,
The vet winching clogged life from the bellowing cow
Until it plopped steaming by her thrashing legs,
Persisting in the frozen morning where I watched,
Wide-eyed, the battle of what he ratcheted to life.
“Find a surgeon to cut that clean out,”
The ER doctor drawled, holding that first x-ray,
But sometimes they resist our determined tug and twist.
I see them spawning as I pass the lawns of neighbors,
Stretching for the life we want for others,
Hunger deeper than our hands can pull.

(First published in slightly different form in Susurrus, Summer 2023. Thanks to the editors.)

I Like to Read About the Ancients

I like to read about the ancients,
Sitting in their little stone houses,
Figuring it all out:

The sun? A chariot pulled by horses.
Disease? Demons pricking you
With tiny pitchforks.
This planet? A bright coin
In the palm of a giant,
His long hair streaming constellations.

Much research remains to be done.
How do the sun’s horses live in the sky?
What are the tiny pitchforks made of?
What will happen if the giant drops the earth?

The horses falter in the flames.
The tips of the tines sink deeper.
The ocean coves tremble like jelly
In the giant’s tiring hand.

(First published in Alternate Route #10, Summer 2023. Thanks to editor Michael Starr.)

My Pretty Roosevelt

Be my Roosevelt,
My four-term President
With a new deal underneath your bright skirt,
Legs shining like US steel,

Someone whom “dapper” still fits,
Cigarette perched in
Its mother-of-pearl holder,
Clamped tight
In your glittering teeth,

And it’s okay
If your other lover
Sleeps with another lover
In your fine white house,

And it’s okay
If while kissing babies for cameras
Atom bombs fall through your head,

And if we sit knee-to-knee
With drunken ministers
And mustachioed murderers,
Plot to make Evil
Blow his foolish brains out,

The bits falling like ticker tape
On the cheering crowds
As the sailor bends the woman back
And drinks deep
And I turn to you,

Will you still be waiting
With that campaign smile,
My pretty Roosevelt?


(First published in Alternate Route #10, Summer 2023. Thanks to editor Michael Starr.)