Historians

We are so tired, we historians, so tired, hired to sanitize dated data, flushed in amnesiac American light. Our popular books see shine, everywhere, everywhere glittering, the future, even the past. NOTE: Forgetting doesn’t work anymore, and moreover, worse than...

Love – Uncertainty

Two cardinals, one red, one brown, gendered opposites, landed feet away on two thin branches of a spindly tree. They saw me, looked at each other, felt trembling, took off in flight. Was it fear, the urge for privacy, or the arboreal quake?  ...

What A Poem Is Not and Is

A poem is not a decoration. not an aromatic candle, not a bauble or a trinket not an ornament for the tree, not a garland or a wreath. A poem is not décor, not a seascape over the couch, not a window curtain curtailing the view, nor a knickknack on a window sill. not...

Population

It sounds like a lot, seven billion. And there will be more. But this morning, as the sun traveled long from China, in a garden in Ohio, there was only one, one bird singing, one man hearing the song.

A Crisis of Scale 

I am walking. An ant is walking too, unwavering, toward my rising, falling shoe. The ant is oblivious to the peril of two scales of the world colliding, mine sizeable, its miniscule. The ant walks on soon to be crushed, three dimensions compressed into two. I, not the...

The Boy

The child in our neighbor’s yard, a boy, ten, their son, unfolding into his father’s fantasy, a blue necessity, soon to adulterate into duties and requirements the heft of his body is expected to fulfill. The boy swings; a rope – a boa, a stick – a sword, on a...