Poetry & Prose
Words Working (1)
Water plunging over stone. Gravid words scrambling hard to escape civility’s incisor edge, unscarred by courtesy. The risk: saying what needs to be said.
A Blessed Life
Evidently, I don’t feel the need to be somebody. No exertion toward celebrity for me. It’s too late now. I’m in my eightieth year. If I wanted to be somebody I should have started years ago. Once I was almost somebody, briefly. Something I did a reporter thought...
Cadillac, Michigan, January, 1963
for Bill & Randy Deep winter, barely the new year in. the lane impassible, we parked the car on Highway 55 and hiked a freezing mile through a pine infused shadows. Arriving at the ice crusted cabin, we gathered wood, paper, matches built a fire in the cast iron...
Beyond ‘About’
I didn’t need a t.v. weatherwoman. I knew it was cold from information gathered from the seat of my pants as I sat on an iron bench on campus in love with Mae. How did I know it was love I was in, and how did I know it was Mae? A pilot, relying on weather reports,...
Truth Be Told
You’re not going to believe a word of this, not a word, although it’s true, sort of. I was told this by a friend who sometimes lies. We all lie a little, sometimes. We say what’s true is false. We say what’s false is true. Not always. Sometimes. Not a lie, exactly,...
Dancing Toward the Winter Moon
We have lived through many moons, quarter, half-moon, full moon, dark, month after month, season after season, years come and years gone, spilling and filling, over and again the cup of borrowed light that is our life, spiraling toward a final fullness, journey of...
Apology in a Grocery Store
Standing in an aisle of fruits and vegetables, past sacks of flour and rows of canned beans, bread loafs sheathed in plastic, potatoes and corn bagged in edible disguises, glistening pink salmon, scintillating trout, gray piled clams, blood red beef, pale pork, a...
Ups & Downs
On this particular day, I did what I do on other particular days, got up, washed up, ate up, cleaned up, hurried up, went downtown, sat down, got down to work, hunkered down, at the watercooler I was put down, felt let down I slowed down, left downtown, came home,...
Lactose Connections
Associative progression: A milkweed pod, a brown-eyed cow, the milky way.
Interspecies Joy
No actors. No bird songs, no squirrels, no lumbering groundhogs, no deer eyes soft among trees. Only things acted upon, rustling leaves, water dripping from a downspout, a shadow moving with the sun. The scene was fauna free. Then a house fly landed on my ankle,...