My Writings

Poem Sampler

In the Exotic Heart of a Walk

It’s not a matter of sneaking.
Just skirt the plastic fence,
popsicle-orange in a stream of sun.
Cross the parking lot,
where crows peck at bare sand.
Past the rail-bridge and through the bushes,
a door of air opens.

You walk a footpath¬—gravelly grey—
not a road, not brick yellow.
Wind is wiggling the syrup river, which roars,
or perhaps that’s the highway.

Blackberry arms reach from the hedges
with bracelets of fat ripe sweetness.
All the trumpets on the vine
play lavender tunes,
while the Great Blue Heron
curls his pretzel yogi neck.

You would walk forever
but cigarette smoke is blowing into your face
from the window of a slick white truck
and you’re back in a parking lot
till next time.

Rituals of Friends

This poem appears in my book, Blown into Now: Poems for a Journey, and was first published in Passager Journal

“I try each day,” he whispers,
“to find color and light
in the world again.
For if I could unblind,
my son is not gone.”

“I wear Suzanne’s clothes,”
she explains slowly.
“In her gloves, I feel her,
and I talk to her children
every week, and I talk
to her grandchildren.”

He holds my arm.
“I have pictures of Phoebe,”
he says, “beside candles,
maybe fifty. Sometimes
I light all of them.”

Still he holds my arm.
“When I meet someone
I describe Phoebe first,
and I have a place where I watch
for her, a sacred tree hidden
among pine and manzanita.”

They turn toward me
and I want to tell them
I keep his unwashed shirt.
Alone, I breathe cotton
and coils of memory.

Wanting in the Canyon

If you lose me, look first
in the tongue of the river
where jade water spins, catching air,
or waits becalmed by eddy fence,
or sucked into glossy mud.

If you are lost, track fast
through sand-broil and lizard rock,
through the dead claws
of tumbleweed,
passing crickets that kneel or plunge,
in winds that circle and rave.

If you wait there, steadfast
through the black cawing flutter,
in the lime shade, near the gnawed trunk,
our want could break free,
pearled in cloud and gleamed by star.
Bare at last.