Ode to a Potato Masher
She who wields you gets a grip on her task and bears down to change one thing into another, like most everything used in the kitchen except for the…
To Bill Zavatsky
Isn’t it my good fortune in this world On a day when there is enough bird seed in the feeder And it has warmed up enough for them to…
On the Indian River
Cicadas taught me to speak in low humming before my mother taught me alphabet or verb— before I learned to bathe alone in the canal behind our house, my…
County Fair
Tuesday, you said, was the easiest night to sneak into the county fair. We hid our bikes in the woods and crawled between the Ferris Wheel and a bounce…
Expedition Notes 13
[a survival guide] I’m learning to collect poisonous plants to help preserve what little food I have left. In my small hollow a few inches of edible leaves…
Etruscan Vase
If only I could speak. Other mouths can. What speech I have, I have in languid length of arm— a slow reaching, ++turn so slight given to tendril, hole-and-corner,…
The New Metaphysics
Intelligence is a hay rick shining in the sun. Pitchfork it up and find Bethlehem moldering and damp, beetles scuttling, and an underlife that tries to explain things. …
On Jane Cooper’s “The Green Notebook”
There are 64 panes in each window of the Harrisville church where we sit listening to a late Haydn quartet. Near the ceiling clouds build up, slowly brightening, then…
Paint on Clay: Homage to the Mimbres
A brave people, who sat up straight in the grave, with only this perforated sacred bowl to protect their heads from the sad hail of dirt clods dropped by…
Intensest Rendezvous, On Encountering a Friend with Little Time
for Mark Green This is therefore the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing. --Wallace Stevens …