I have returned without mountains to my small accustomed place,
bounded by a tottering fence of anonymous color,
old bird bath dark with rusted leaves and clouds of moss,
an exact space defined in all dimensions, detailed in city records,
this bought and paid for lot, entirely without mountains.
I can fill these spaces with one finger to my eye,
I can ask a friendly god a favor. A long way
from blind giants making their own weather,
throwing clouds of snow over granite shoulders
as if warding off some cosmic curse.
Some things are too big to be seen,
blurs of many seasons endured
in an alien morning, photographs futile,
perspective flattens and fails,
the vast forest we spent half a day traversing
shrunk into an afterthought of sticks.
I could never bear Good and Evil on such a scale,
someone once said of a famous book of myth –
the same when I was heavy with mountains,
beauty bearing down with crushing weight,
now sorting through the epic mysteries
to the stormy picture of you near the trail,
snowflakes across the secretless curve of your mouth
like fireflies, a smile I was glad to recognize
among the spectacular indifference,
a smile without mountains.
(First published in Bracken #13, June 2025. Thanks to the editors.)
Tag Archives: Writing
“Enough” nominated for 2026 Best of the Net
For the second year in a row, I’ve been fortunate to have a poem nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology awards. While you definitely can’t depend on award nominations for writing inspiration, that positive energy can last a while. Grateful to Susan Swartwout and her staff at Delta Poetry Review.
A Snow Hike
An afternoon of bright needles on our faces. The frozen lake, the tree-dark shoreline. Our hiking poles tapped the ice on the trail, boots crunching. A stop in a clearing, a repeated hum against my body like the cry of a tiny animal, a message arriving in snow and silence. I returned the words from nearly two thousand miles away to my pocket. We were quiet for a while, shouldered our poles and held gloved hands tight on the wide trail. Pitch pine and cedar, holly and oak.
hiking in the snow
the news of his cancer
cold in my pocket
(First published in Bracken #13, June 2025. Thanks to the editors.)
Home
When I was small, a gopher came to make holes in the yard.
It needed a home, chose the one Daddy had found for us,
a rental with siding of sandpaper slate. The wooden floors
were food for termites. Hornets ripened in the garage.
Daddy looked at the holes and quietly began,
pieced together the shotgun I had never known.
He had conjured it for this moment. A serious smell,
oil and cold metal. The parts clicked and snapped together.
Mother and I watched from the den window.
Her hand on my shoulder. Daddy flooded the holes
with the garden hose. Raised the gun slowly
in the humming pecan and persimmon shade.
When the dark head appeared, the gun blasted
in Daddy’s hands, was broken back into pieces,
returned to the deep closet. Don’t even touch it,
I was told. I never did.
(First published in The Harvard Advocate, Fall 2024. Thanks to the editors.)
Enough
You had sat at our tables for decades,
until one day, in the midst of a story told many times,
you carried a flickering question
through the crumpling hallways of yourself,
and you answered, enough. And as we continued
to pass the plates and tell the stories,
you listened to your growing silence, then dropping everything
as if to say, you’re not listening, your stillness at first unheard
among the clacking Fiestaware collected through three generations,
each embossing thinner than the grandmother before.
How do we decide to turn our heads to the wall? I can still taste
the lemon icebox pie at that Memphis restaurant by the railroad track,
the chefs and servers holding hands in a circle and praying,
see our first-born daughter lifted shivering and bloody
into the light, feel the tang of a tongue’s tip caress my own
as she and I swayed in her kitchen, that swallowtail the size of a bird
tasting blooms on my grandfather’s casket while the minister spoke,
the silent weeping of my daddy, its great black and yellow wings
opening, closing when our eyes widened briefly
in clumsy astonishment, then resuming the meals and the days,
hours opening, closing like wings slowly drying, waiting for us
to put down the bright bowls, to have had enough.
(First published in Delta Poetry Review 6:18, October 2024. Thanks to the editors.)