Poetry

Repairing the wind chimes

At autumn’s end, I collect our downed
wind chimes, strewn on the ground like spent

shell casings. Then in January I hang the whole
contraption—silenced in the winter-still air

from a rafter in the basement’s cavernous light,
frayed cords the color of weather, snarled

like a shipwreck. Then I take up needle,
knife, and twine and set to re-rigging

them, fathom the secret of knots and restore
them to the balance and pitch tuned

by the invisible gods of wind. But when
I touch them, they only clatter a discordant

peal. If I could quiet them, yoke these burnished
columns of air. If I could scuttle my wreckage,

and tie the winds together.

January, 2025

If we’ve only learned one thing from Beowulf (and I certainly hope you’ve learned more than that), it’s that life is going to keep tearing down your wind chimes. In January, there’s a foundational impulse to mend what the previous year has pulled asunder, some of which remains beyond repair. But through the dazzling mechanism of our humanity, we continue to cobble what the world has taken apart, even if it’s doomed to be destroyed again. It’s how we survive.

choosing a Stone II

Every stone tells a story.
I’m sure of it. Lay your head
against a stone. Listen

as it utters its histories:
how it once ground an axe,
marked the grave of a child,

traveled miles in the boot
of a soldier retreating
from Moscow, then sunk

into the muck of a river
like a star. Water flows
around it, or pours

over its glistening armature,
the stone bowing in supplication.
(That’s the way it is with stones.)

Every stone tells a story.
Yours is still out there,
waiting for you. Choose a stone

but by evening leave it at the bend
in the road to mark the place
where you got lost,

or drop it into your pocket
for luck if nothing else.

December, 2024

Here’s the second of the eponymous poems of my last book. Let’s be clear: stones are numinous, nature’s insoluble totems. How many of us have brought stones back from a trip as a souvenir? In my office I have a wedge of granite from a brook deep in the Adirondack High Peaks wilderness, a chunk of red sandstone from Garden of the Gods, and one from Maine’s Quoddy Head, the easternmost point of land in the contiguous U.S. Stones tell us where we’ve been, and likely suggest just as much about where we’re going.  

Geese in November

The whole ragged squadron heads south in a jubilant V
through the thin, blue air. If I were heading south now,
I too would signal victory, announcing my departure

like a train conductor who loves his job, delivering
his oratorio of next stops. Yet each year I watch them
and before I know think, Oh Hell, there they go,

another gaggle of plumed maestros, harp-shaped wings
flashing in the year’s failing light, trumpeting
their stark refrains of exultation and farewell.

November, 2024

I started this poem one late fall day some years ago, while standing on a ladder painting my cottage on the coast of Maine. I first heard, then saw, the wobbly string of geese noisily winging south over the cove and felt that familiar pang of melancholy. It’s what I think of as a mortal parting, one of those small departures that drains a few extra grains out of your hourglass. The sight of geese flying south in autumn takes a little out of you. 

Choosing a stone i

Go out and gather stones
when it’s raining,
on a day when a single gesture

anchors the world and a stone
reflects the deeper contemplation
of whoever cradles it,

shining and wet in his palm.
Its silence is of men

who have fished too long,

of hunters who return home
through bare trees.

Lover of animals, namer of stars,

choose a stone, dense with the weight
of an unanswered question.

Plunge it into a lake

where the dark surface

has been smoothed by cold.

The world shudders in its absence

which the widening rings quietly confirm.

October, 2024

I habitually collect stones and keep buckets of them in our garage and on the basement workbench. I assemble them into little cairns around the property, to mark my territory, I suppose. They give me a sense of solidity, extra gravity in these dangerous and uncertain times, a foundational steadiness against time and its implacable power to tear us and our best laid plans asunder. I figure the words stone and rock are interchangeable, though I tend to think of stones as a bit more sophisticated, polished if you will.

Labor Day

A fifty-mile-an-hour gale
broke a branch off the sugar maple

in front of the house. It lay in the street, its
hand-shaped leaves exhaling carbon dioxide,

drooping downward toward the earth.
That afternoon, I dragged it down the street,

heavy as my body, tattered work gloves making fists
around the splintered stump where it had parted

company with the trunk of the tree. It followed
me with the sound of flowing water, of sweeping,

of wind in corridors where nobody lives anymore.
In the yard I sawed it up by hand into firewood,

crushed the leaves into the compost, bundled
and bound the twigs with twine and left them

by the curb to be carried off like smoke
through trees. I hung up the saw and left

the gloves on the fence by the shed
to air my sweat into the wind.

September, 2024

I refuse to accept Labor Day as the end of summer. Who decided that? Astronomically, the season continues for nearly another three weeks. There’s still baseball and the weather remains largely summery even as the days begin to noticeably shorten. Under close regard it’s remarkable how our mortal acts and gestures are often yoked to the forces of the non-human world. Here, the expiration of a living branch is redeemed through the sublimation of human sweat into the wind that bears it back into the blue vault of the sky.

AUGUST—RED MOUND, WI

Drought summer, grasses scorched
under dry, blue sky. Noon: sunflowers
nod in the hot breeze, yellowjackets cut
the air. Jerusalem artichokes and thistle

tumble through gray wood fence slats.
Rope hammock slung in pin oak shade,
field sparrows and jays swipe at the feeders,
turkey vultures drift off the escarpment. Work

to do but it can wait. The sky hurries to go
nowhere. Cloud shadows unroll across a plain
scoured clear by the last glacier
where now yucca rattle their white bells.

August, 2024

I love intense weather, and once pedaled to a Brewers game in the sleet. I couldn’t have been happier. In this poem, I aimed to find the stark extremities of late summer, a wild vitality at once declarative and rapturous, a severe landscape which has only just subsumed its deep histories. Here is elegance in extremity and tranquil exultation. Here are the small, miraculous seams between biota, gathered beneath a serene expanse of sky. Enjoy this moment–summer’s most extravagant expression.

apologia

I apologize.

I apologize for not making at least an effort
at polite conversation with our hostess
at the dinner party. I didn’t like her.
She’s a snob and told boring stories

about firing her decorator. But I do regret this.
So please forgive me. Let me likewise apologize
for teasing your student. He was crow-like
in his black hair and black clothes.

He was so serious, and his skin was so pale.
I couldn’t resist. Sorry. Please forgive me,
too, for that time I spoke up and expressed
my opinion. What was I thinking? I am

terribly sorry that I didn’t just keep my big,
stupid mouth shut. It’s truly unforgivable,
I know. It’s been all my fault, and I’ll do my best
to make sure it never happens again. You can

count on me. While we’re on the subject,
I’d like to apologize for the Kennedy assassination—
the first one, at least. But you see, I was five years old,
and lived 1,400 miles away. I’m so sorry.

There was nothing I could do.

July, 2024

I’m struck by the volume of luminaries who reject the apology as an abject waste of one’s precious time. Harry Truman and P.G. Wodehouse both suggest it’s better to just stay on offense, “apology”deriving from the Greek word for “defense.” If the Jesuits taught me nothing else, I certainly learned from their example that it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. That turned out well. Over the years, I’ve come up with more apologies than I can count. I ought to be getting pretty good at it by now.

DEATHBED CONFESSION

I should have saved the money from my first
communion and invested it in a denim mill.
I didn’t fish enough, which accounts
for my long silences and poor listening skills
unless it was to Bill Evans playing
the Sunday afternoon set at the Village Vanguard.
I attended Catholic school where I learned
the fear of God and long division, and commenced
my long career in daydreaming. I daydreamed
the way kindergarten teachers, welders,
traffic cops, and trapeze artists long to.
I daydreamed away whole centuries, some in which
the stars were still dark, some in which mammals
crawled out of the sea, and another in which
submarines were invented and an entire male
culture was founded on Scotch and razors.
In another someone claimed to have walked
on the moon, and people tried to save the whales.
That was back when there was only one god.
In my dark night of the soul there were
no clocks and it never stopped snowing.
I tried to like poetry, but thought Eliot was a drip,
Yeats a little off. What do you expect from a guy
who never did a day’s manual labor in his life?
Whatever I did, I did in vain, never malice.
If you remember anything of me, remember
that I was always the first to get my hands dirtied
and my nose bloodied, that I always refused
the blindfold but took the cigarette. As to my demons,
for their long years of faithful subversion of my few
wholesome impulses, I bequeath my remaining properties:
empires where the dead are still catapulted
over parapets and moats, the bone-colored villas
by the sea, the terribly gracious orchards, the dangerous minarets. Hell’s little half-acre.

June, 2024

I can’t imagine what inspired this ode to last words. I suppose sooner or later every great poet commits their deathbed confession to paper, ideally getting it down well before they check out. Traditionally, these revelations seem aimed largely at relieving guilt. (Some deathbed confessions can be rather lurid and unsettling.) I just wouldn’t know where to start. But I suppose it’s best to get these things squared away in advance, as you never know what you’re going to cough up as the light starts fading.

ENTROPY

The measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work.

–Encyclopedia Brittanica

I flunked chemistry
junior year of high school—
a stain on my permanent

record, leaving an indelible
blot to dog—or even
hound–me through

miserable decades of
failure to launch
a career in the field.

It could have been
all the daydreaming
I accomplished

that year, harder than
it sounds what with
Sister Thomas carrying

on endlessly about acids,
nucleotides, and
the monatomic ion,

perversely refuting
Planck’s constant
and touting with

fiendish devotion the
practical applications
of the null hypothesis.

She yammered, I stared
out the classroom
window watching clouds

huddle in the flat sky
above the football field.
They’d part and run

patterns, rolling and
tumbling over one
another, then meet and

separate with astonishing
fluidity, and I would
augur in their vaporous

writhings a brilliant
future for myself
the way oracles

of old would divine
the outcome of battle
in the entrails of a hen.

I gazed languidly
at the sky and saw
for myself an astonishing

life ahead, a future
where I would at last
grasp the concept

of the free radical,
then fail stunningly
to great acclaim

then fail again
with abandon.
So, I declined to learn

whatever I needed
to pass then made
myself scarce before

they could teach
me anything more
about cluster

compounds, noble
gas and weak acids.
About entropy.

May, 2024

As graduation looms for many aspiring young scholars and scientists, I offer this true story from my own high school days. This poem is, in fact, mostly true except for the name Sister Thomas, whose identity I decided to protect with an alias. Her name was actually Sister Joseph Marie. Looking back now, it’s lucky I didn’t go into chemistry after all, but became a career poet instead. If it weren’t for poetry, I’d probably be living a quiet, respectable life right about now.

ophelia

Under spring stars,
he touched my face and breasts
and the innumerable moons of my body.

For months, I listened for him
everywhere, hearing his laugh now and again
down stone corridors or across the hushed drifts
that chilled Elsinore.

And once only did I find him,
that shadow darkening his strange brow
talking to the players in whispers
in a cold chamber.

My refuge, then, was the childhood willow
where I climbed and sang clear
above the brook.

And when I descended into the arms
of the water, I turned slowly
listening with eyelashes, fingertips,
one arm thrown out to the current
that swallowed me like snow.

April, 2024

For National Poetry Month we go back to my first published poem, from my Hamlet series. One of my creative writing students recently asked about what novelist and scholar, Will Storr, calls the “sacred flaw,” that tragic impulse for failure lodged like a thorn deep within every fictional hero. They asked what I might identify as Hamlet’s sacred flaw, and before I could blurt out, “being a jerk,” I managed, “existential disaffection,” instead. But let’s not forget: he was mean to poor Ophelia, too. Jerk.

The Japanese House

Poems for a Lost Museum #5

— Milwaukee Public Museum

There are no roads to this sanka—we long ago
left them to the rains which have forgotten them,

sunk in a copse of matsu. Now an archipelago
of stone lamps anchors the depths of the path

to this pearl dropped into night’s cove of ink.
Paper screens pared from the new moon sculpt

a gulf of silence, a place to listen to the autumn
wind off cornices lathed to the curve of a dragon’s

wing. Summer, we open the screens, kimono spill
and pool in the dusk, rippling at our knees. Winter

we pull our silks close and ponder the serene
exile of the moon. Drenched in the light of its breathless

seas, we turn to the game of One Hundred Poets,
each card bearing a solitary tanka enfolding

its desolate secrets, the ones we promised to keep
between us: how the eaves draw closer to listen,

how the orchids have learned to divide into stars,
how each card catches the light as would a shell

or a temple bell rung by the wind

March, 2024

I served for twenty years as the Milwaukee Public Museum’s Education Programs Coordinator and Writer-in-Residence, and the Japanese House is my favorite exhibit. Plans now are to close the museum permanently after nearly 140 years. A profound loss for the Milwaukee region and the world community of museums. This poem is the fifth in a series of twelve I’m composing to help redeem the loss and perhaps salvage a chronicle of the museum’s indelible legacy with a literary voice.

Sleet

When it’s sleeting, I think right away of the places where it’s likely sleeting worse. You can bet it’s sleeting heavily in Yellowknife, Murmansk, Tromsø, Minneapolis, or Wroclaw. These are probably the sleet capitals of the world where the bleary, inconclusive gray of rain-ice make the buildings across the street seem a thousand miles away, sleet pricking the petrified windows all day like a tattoo artist with blue hands. Old ladies slip on the ice. Dogs lick their frozen paws. People shuffle through the sleet, their heads bowed. The cities try to plow the sleet, but it’s no use. The blades grind the pavement to salt, the scraping sound rattling the houses with the roar of a damaged plane searching for a place to land. Yet the sleet keeps coming down. It produces a trance-like state in the mail carriers, in the pastry chefs and tailors sitting alone with a CLOSED sign hanging by a nail on the front door. They’re imagining the sleetless locales of Vientiane, Cabo, Verde, Wollongong, and Bahia Honda, and recalling the time they saw angels come back from the dead, when they left flowers at the statues of headless saints.

February, 2024

Back to prose poem country with a particularly seasonal offering. I used to hate winter, but these days I like it as much as summer. I consider its severe landscapes, the austere silences a form of drama. I like walking through falling snow or hunkering inside in a winter rain. But there’s something about sleet that beats your head down. It just thrashes the soul out of you. But hold fast—it’s only about two months to opening day.

A cup of tea

 – For Robin

When I stand at the stove
and pour you a cup of tea,

I am a tree bending low
over swampy ground.

All around me, leaves steep
in a cold mist.

Steam swirls quickly up
into the air,

unravels its first sentence.
Rising, it turns into light,

and the light becomes chill air
leading me

into black night
and vault of stars beyond.

This is the first lesson
of true living.

January, 2024

Here’s another poem I pulled from The Discovery of Heaven to get us grounded and off to a bright start for the new year. Last fall, I led a panel with three other poets on the topic of loss and poetic restoration, in which we averred that a poem is an act of respiration, its rhythms and patterns paralleling the cycle of human breath. In this, a good poem bears a distinct perpetuity. Hence its capacity to calm, cure, salve, and soothe us, perhaps like a well-poured cup of tea.

The Invaders

Their crest is a raven
perched on a dead branch.
Smoke from a besieged city
their tattered flag.

Drained by pillage and ambuscades,
all invaders finally are the same:
exhausted, bloodied, far from the sea.

Navigating by stars already burned out,
and following the branches of snow
into evening.

Plundered villages burn
under the north star.

And as the wind sweeps their tracks,
a wounded captain stands in the snow,
a broken compass held to his ear
like a shell.

December, 2023

Someone said that in war, there are never two sides, only one: suffering. I plucked this piece from my second collection, Choosing a Stone. It is perhaps an unlikely choice for the season, but supplication nonetheless for a measured voice as the world continues to rend itself through grinding, intractable conflict. What is the wounded captain hearing as he places his ear to the broken compass cracked with pain? What does he hear? Listen.

Threading a Needle

Forget about the rich man and the camel.
Forget blunt fingers, failing eyesight

the dim November light. The needle’s eye
seems forbidding to anyone poised with thread

at its impossible aperture. Splitting an atom,
I suspect, is easier, luck is easier.

Behold then the concentration of a sewer sitting
under a lamp her entire being bent

to the threading, thumb and forefinger flourishing
the hopeful, perfect sign. She holds the needle aloft,

eyes narrowed, peering toward fabulous distances,
the thread a lifeline through eternity’s keyhole,

inscrutable noose that will never be snugged.

November, 2023

Here’s a poem from my first collection, The Discovery of Heaven. A brilliant and charming poet I’m well acquainted with likes to say that a good poem tells secrets about mysteries. This is what gets the poet’s blood pumping: the possibility that some particle of the unfathomable may be exposed in the poem’s telling, bearing perhaps a soupçon of hope that in one blessed stroke of fortune, we’ll at last be shone the light, if only a wee fleeting splinter of it. 

At the autumnal equinox

In Memoriam, Charles Simic

Perhaps the last day for some while
I’ll throw the window open to the sun
High in the afternoon sky
Making the street trees stir with joy.

It’s moments like this when I think back
On my barnstorming days, nothing
But dumb luck and an ace
Up my sleeve, veils of cirrostratus

lifting me above everything I ever knew.
I recall the heroic blue of the autumn sky,
Of how bridges stitched the landscape,
And wing-walkers strolled the width

Of eternities across the bright yellow canvas
Stretched over the wings. Then I remember
My leather helmet and goggles,
And my long silk scarf streaming in the wind.

October, 2023

Hello all. This would have made a fine September Poem-of-the-Month, but I just learned of the passing of poet, Charles Simic. I went to graduate school to study with him, and I can’t overstate the indelible impact he had on my writing. It would take volumes. No one could describe how the setting sun sets fire to the windows of an empty factory quite like Charlie. Each of his astonishing poems bears the quotidian secrets of the cosmos framed against the strange and resonant silence at the heart of human mystery.

Food Chain

First there were the coyotes—though that may not be entirely clear. Maybe the turkeys were first, roosting in the trees, attracting the coyotes in the twilight woods, the turkeys getting the worst of it. Actually, we never saw the coyotes, just the turkeys, strutting around the intersection by the community bank across the road from the Southern Illinois track, pecking for scraps in the street. Soon they were stopping traffic and surrounding cars. People honked their horns but the turkeys were too dumb to move out of the way. Then people started yelling at the City to do something. A pro-turkey caucus staged a protest at the intersection. Then the City trapped them, had them butchered, and donated to the local food pantry at Thanksgiving. The pro-turkey caucus held another protest. Eventually, the coyotes got hungry and made a run at some poor old lady’s little dog. She complained to the County, which trapped and “euthanized” them, which means killed. No coyotes, turkeys are in the pink and they returned to surrounding cars. Motorists are mad as hell all over again, and concerned citizens are demanding the State do something before the stupid turkeys foment a real crisis. But for now, the turkeys are as happy as ever, not a care in the world. Not at least until the coyotes come back. Then there’s bound to be trouble.

September, 2023

Another prose poem and a true story. Mostly. One advantage of the prose poem is that you can forget about meter. I’m not much of a meter guy anyway. I’m too busy trying to write well. But it lowers the stakes a bit and you don’t have to wrestle with line breaks either (though that’s the fun part). So, the prose poem operates at a somewhat lower frequency than a poetry poem, and maybe gives the poet a bit of a break for a change. Maybe. Stupid turkeys.

JACKSON POLLACK’S NO. 34

You can see
the angry places—
black slashes

like whips cutting
pale sky. The few
orange strokes

are what’s left
of pelts dragged
from the arena.

The yellow parts
are where you’d hide
if you could.

The malachite is malachite.
I don’t know
what the red splashes are

but they can’t be good.

August, 2023

Here’s a scrap of ekphrastic verse—poetry inspired by a work of fine art. Last year, I served as an Arts Grant Panelist with the National Endowment for the Arts. I’ve always loved art, but figured I was a little rusty. Poking around in my art books to get my head in the game, I landed on Jackson Pollack’s Number 34. Sure, maybe your kid could have painted it, but they couldn’t have yoked every brushstroke—or drip—to an emotionally grounded, coherent aesthetic. Just try that one, junior.

HAMMOCK SEASON

Hawsered in this languorous snare,
I’m lolling in summer’s blue estuaries,
breaking the sky’s miraculous
code under the eyelid’s revenant eclipse
where July’s fireworks flower.

Indolence is the virtue
of those suspended, slumped
in the sag of slumber. How easily
my vocabulary yields to the z’s of idleness:
doze, daze, drowse and laze.

I’ve grown the pelt of the sloth
and can no longer grasp
the yard rake or the hoe.
Let the compost go unturned,
the grass become deep as a bed.

Let the employable and the conscientious
bustle and fuss. I’m weightless with the gods
of the sun, nodding like a sunflower in the breeze.
And when the Muse arrives, tell her
to come back when I’m not so busy.

This is going to take awhile.

July, 2023

Work is good for you. It strengthens the body, focuses the mind, purifies the heart and elevates the spirit. I wouldn’t know this from personal experience, but it’s what I’ve always heard. In the all too brief and fleeting summer months, I spend plenty of time in my hammock, considering work and its many virtues, and likewise pondering how it is best avoided, thoughtlessly luxuriating in the hammock’s generous latitudes, and the weightlessness and suspension above this care-worn globe it confers. Happy summer!

The Care of Fine Books

When someone tells me it’s damaging
to close a book with a pen or a pencil inside it
as a bookmark, I tell them, I know.
When they say that it stresses the binding,

I say, Yes, I’m confident that it does. No wonder
I have no regard for fine books, casting
them callously aside, a Pentel EnerGel
with a 1.0mm ball and metal point jammed

between the pages of Rasputin: Faith, Power,
and the Twilight of the Romanovs, or The Louse
that Conquered Napoleon’s Army, or The Ice Pick Surgeon,*
threatening to split the spine’s wondrous sinews,

and scattering the pages to the four winds
only so I can run frantically after them in a heavy gale,
one hand holding my hat to my head, the other
gathering the leaves and stuffing them

into the bottomless pockets of my trench coat.

*(All real books.)

June, 2023

In one of his Mad Farmer poems (I forget which one), Wendell Berry exhorts us to do something each day “that won’t compute.” There’s divine madness in the human impulse to do things that just aren’t prudent, advisable, or otherwise sound. It’s how we test ourselves against the universe, shaping our identity, and honing it to a rather more brave – and giddy – responsiveness. Sometimes, you just have to do something that won’t compute, just to see what the hell’s going to happen.

Ghost Orchid

Did you see the blind old codger
On the street corner, bent over
His white cane, eyes closed,
A ghost orchid pinned to his lapel

Waiting patiently for the #66 bus,
His fellow travellers taking
A last quick drag of their cigarettes
Before stubbing them out

On the sidewalk where children
have just chalked the secret name
of the Supreme Leader before their mothers
called them home for a good spanking?

May, 2023

We impulsively take poetry too seriously. Just my two cents. And truly good poets are, at their core, tricksters and mischief-makers, among which I dare to count myself. So, here’s a mischievous little slice of doggerel for the merry month of May. I’m invariably drawn to poems that don’t much give a hoot. That is to say, they’re less interested in making a point about love, death, or taxes, and more preoccupied with taking a wee twisted route, just to have a wicked bit of fun with us.

The Great horned owl’s sermon

Nightfall. The Great Horned,
from his pulpit in the black spruce,
preaches his best sermon,
the one in which the mice

shall inherit the earth—
the ones struck blind
by the early morning light,
and the loaves and fishes

and whatever scraps remain,
are strewn upon the bare ground
for the scarecrows. “My heart,”
he tells them, “is a red turbine,

red as the armies of the east and
to those who have accepted sleet
as their savior, you whose cries
are heard among the bare trees

whose shadows on the snow
have left the faithful shaken
with fear, I tell you this:
you shall see the sky

charged again with the dark
symphonic clouds that once
delivered so much heavy rain
to Birnam Wood cloaking

our numbers as we drew blood
from the darkness, and broke the vast
silence of the Almighty.
Welcome to the night shift.”

April, 2023

Here’s a companion piece to my poem, “The Great Horned Owl’s Monologue,” from Choosing a Stone. I worked with Great Horned owls for years. They leave an impression. Among wildlife biologists, the Great Horned is an eminence—obdurate, savage, and utterly without fear. Recently, one of them took up residence in the spruce behind our house, calling out every day around dusk, often deep into the night when a fellow (a mated pair?) calls back out of the dark. It’s at once macabre and hopeful.

Driving at Night

The road bends like starlight
reaching the Earth. The white lines
have traveled a million years
to get here. The dash glows

like quarried stone. Our headlights
carve a keyhole in the black,
and on the curves pick up
the route signs torn with

bullet holes, broken
glass in the oily gravel, the white
cross hung with a rosary.
Nothing down this country road

but a vanishing point where a comet
hangs by its burning tail,
low in the sky, and our hearts stop
for just a moment

before we swear ourselves to secrecy.

March, 2023

I love driving at night. Though I don’t do it much anymore like when I used to cover long stretches of blacktop between widespread gigs and little towns. It’s the closest you’ll ever get to the firmament and the road at the same time, and is thus at once intensely secret and cosmic. The next time you drive at night, watch how the headlights hollow out a route through kingdom come right in front of you. Watch how you follow, unswervingly into the dark.

TUESDAY: DEFINITION

1. From Norse mythology Tiw or Týr,
   the god of single combat;
2. The day following Monday;
   the ache after a bruise;
3. According to the song, it’s just as stormy
   as Monday;
4. The day the New York Times
   publishes its weekly Science section;
5. The day before the New York Times
   publishes its weekly Food section;
6. The day you try and look over
   to see the weekend, but Wednesday’s
   in the way;
7. A day in Wichita in February
   when it’s sleeting;
8. Statistically, the day of the week least likely
   to have Christmas Eve on it;
9. Most car accidents happen on Tuesday,
   or you get take-out. Or both;
10. It wanders in endless circles lost in the wastelands
    of eternity,
11. Looking for closed restaurants and museums.

February, 2023

Let’s face it: Tuesday stinks. I hate Mondays, but keep in my heart an unalloyed loathing of Tuesdays. You figure that if you can get through Monday, you’ve got a handle on your week, and can feel proud that you stuck it out. Then comes Tuesday like a punch in the kisser, deflating your hard-earned Monday optimism. Like the song says, “They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad.” Gratitude and apologies to poet-friend Judy Kerman for the inspiration.

Florida

Old people, they say, go to Florida for the winter, or just outright move down there permanently to live, maybe to die, too. The older you get, apparently, the more the snow, ice, and cold gets to you, petrifies your skin, slows your blood, and cracks your bones, leaving you helpless, shut in and worrying as the first flakes fall, about the heating bill, about walking the dog or how to get to church or synagogue. Some old people smell like mothballs—that chemical, naphthalene—that perhaps masks them from predators, or preserves them against the Gulf’s punishing sunshine. If I were old, I wouldn’t smell like mothballs, even in Florida, a place I wouldn’t be caught dead in. I’d smell the way I always have: of spruce tar and lime, a little bourbon, a splash of Brut. Of fresh clean sheets flapping in the wind.

January, 2023

I’ve loved the prose poem ever since I encountered those of Francis Ponge, the French master of the form, and have since published many of my own. They’re notoriously tough to define, but let’s first consider they’re poems written in a prose form. So, there’s no turn at the end of the line. And, unlike a random paragraph of prose, they include a beginning, middle, and end. Pretty cool, right? Why do I sometimes write a prose poem instead of a poetry poem? Wish I knew.

Canticle for the new moon

God’s eyelid closes on the day,
and for a little while there’s a bone
left to gnaw in the coal sack of night.

This is the one you’ve heard of
in the children’s verse where the new moon
is cradled asleep in the arms of the old

which flares in its fiery draft. Too thin
to howl at, too slight to light the path home.
Satellite of a lost planet,

sleepwalking scrap of crab shell, pared
from the galaxy’s tidal murk, worn to a hollow
in the solar undertow

but burnished still, and waiting
only to be struck, as is a coin
or a match in the dark.

December, 2022

Poets are always writing about the moon. I do it all the time. I’m convinced that the first poem ever written described its desolate face, its lonely seas. Corner a poet, and within five minutes they’ll be yammering at you about the moon. But that’s OK. It beats writing more poems about love and death. And it’s emblematic of our mortal longing, a desperate cosmic impulse to yoke ourselves any way we can to what we see, but can never reach.

Canned

In late August, when ripe garden crops
begin to drop, my wife takes over
the kitchen, brings out the jars and rubber rings,
and with a maniacal ferocity begins

to seal what’s left of our late garden,
and I stand still at my peril lest I wind up
in a Mason jar where I would pass
the long winter on a shelf, pickled,

no virtue left to me but patience,
the patience of salt, eyes shut tight
against the bite of peppercorns, the kelpy
webs of dill, while talons of garlic clutch

my skin and my skeletal system remains
collapsed in the enduring serenity of brine.
Then there comes that first warm day
in April—after months listening closely

for her footfalls on the root cellar steps—
when I am released back into that old,
familiar world that has, astonishingly,
flourished bravely in my absence

just in time to plant what we call spring.

November, 2022

Here’s a poem for the harvest as we step into autumn’s deepest waters. Many thanks to DeWitt Clinton, a fine poet and good friend, for the initial prompt, and for a few key edits that got the poem in gear. It’s mostly true except for the part about keeping my eyes shut. In fact, I kept one peeled, so to speak, Odin-like, to watch the half moon cloves of garlic floating around the inside of the jar. It’s not what I’d call first-class entertainment, but any port in a storm.

A Good Day

To go out and work all day in the sun and wind.
To pull weeds. To pick tomatoes and blackberries.

To assemble the new picnic table, snug the bolts
and slap it with a coat of stain. To eat cold pasta

with iced tea for lunch in the shade of a Black Hills spruce.
To watch the stain soak into the table like honey,

to move the pile of bricks from one end of the place to the other.
To swat the paper wasp nest off the cornice. To run.

To watch new rabbits panting in the shade of the choke cherry.
To have a splinter and a swollen knuckle, your hands still sticky

with stain. To be soaked with sweat and bug spray. To be insect-bit
and sunburned, soil jammed under your nails. To put tools away

and go inside while it’s still light. To be hungry again. To be tired.
That is a good day. That is a very good day.

October, 2022

I wrote this poem in August, and it’s truly a summer poem. But it won’t hurt to look back for a moment as we enter autumn. I’d been thinking about how we don’t seem to go outside as much now, to get our hands dirty, scrape knees and knuckles, and just spend a day losing ourselves in messy physical work.  Sometimes you have to go out and get beat up by nature a little. This may sound like a lousy day. To me, it’s transcendent.

Symphony Hall- A True Story

The musicians were the finest the world had to offer,
and my dressing room, which I had
all to myself, vast and elegantly appointed.
Everyone knocked before entering,

including the valet who brought me spring water
and fresh towels. That was his only job.
Don’t get used to this, I told myself.
I keep thinking of that dressing room,

how far it was from the stage, how it seemed
always filled with immense quiet. I remember
the thick rug of crimson and Persian gold,
the tall mirror framed by tiny lights.

The small, white rose afloat in a glass of water.

September, 2022

This is a true story. Mostly. I did perform my writing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra once. My job was to write a script of vignettes to be performed with the conductor during a children’s concert series of classical pieces inspired by outer space. I was thus accorded “soloist” status for the series, and assigned the soloist’s exotically appointed dressing room, and valet. Wisely, I didn’t get used to it. But I sure could have.

Shell

– After the photograph, “Truck Stop Shell”
by Greg Clary

They walked away from the last fuel
depot of the Anthropocene the moment
the restroom trash cans were full, tossing

the keys into gravity’s undertow, cheering
as they fell, leaving the bright plastic
porticos under rain the color of steel

shavings. They called it a lunar landscape,
but it couldn’t be further from the moon,
even the dark side of a moon that hasn’t

been found yet. We get the gas stations
we deserve. Semi-rigs stayed ahead
of the Great Flood, air-brakes warping

the panes with planetary static, barreling
straight through to Kingdom Come.
They were searching for a theory of how space

acquires energy, and the answer came back
wrong, wrong by a lot. Do you see that cloud,
trudging on empty and charged with spent

nebulae bearing gallons of solar atoms?
Do you see all that dark matter
just waiting for a lit match?

August, 2022

One of the more intriguing implications of the global surge in oil prices is that gas stations have joined lawyers at the nadir of public opinion. “Shell” is inspired by the photograph Truck Stop Shell, by Greg Clary, depicting an abandoned Shell gas station, clearly left to the dereliction of time, yet stubbornly resisting its most dire ravages because it’s made of plastic. Or something. As a charming and brilliant poet has pointed out, we get the gas stations we deserve.

Grilling with the Buddha

The Buddha’s not a frequent visitor,
only dropping by every thousand years
or so of a summer’s evening when one planet

or another is nudging the crescent moon
slowly into dusk’s purple robes. He settles
into his favorite chair, the canvas one –

tattered blue, cigarette burns in the armrest –
arranging around himself his loose summer yukata.
I’m ready with my kettle grill and tongs. We smile.

I sip my beer, the Buddha his rice wine.
He’s a charcoal man, a votary of the living coals
beneath the mortal ash. We’re happy as we watch

the prayerful ascent of smoke rise through the conifers,
deep into the jade of twilight. So when the filet
of tender-hearted salmon once again flames

and crumbles through the pure geometry of the grill,
I sigh, the Buddha shrugs. The world subsides
into its quiet order of heat and cool as we sit back

and watch our brother bats slicing across the sidereal field
chasing the evening’s first mosquitoes.

July, 2022

I grill year round but, of course, summer is grilling’s true season. And I mostly stick with charcoal. It’s elemental, it’s authentic. Its foundational characteristics are fire, air, and coals bearing the deep, spectral luminosity of a solar flare. Too, you get to play with matches. What’s not to like? There persists a lively debate over the Buddha’s dietary predilection. Was he vegetarian – or perhaps even vegan? Here, I compromise a bit and allow him the delights of the pescavore.

NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

Our pockets full of stones, we went in search
of the needle in a haystack, the one
the undertaker uses to prick your neck,
the surgeon to administer his ether,

the night to blacken its windows.
It’s the blue one tipped with blood,
and the eye through which you chase
the dragon, the shining cells of the serpent,

ants and flies for company. We never
found the needle, but the eye started turning
up everywhere – in the vest pocket of the bum
sleeping on a bench in the freezing rain,

in the keyholes on death row, in the nets
dragging the river for loose change,
and a lens through which we read
the fine print, the rain-slicked gravestones.

The writing on the wall.

April, 2022

What can I say about this poem? Qu’est-ce que c’est? I already had the ending, which I liked a lot, so I followed my impulse to drive the poem in that direction. Or something. I like writing poems with slight-of-hand maneuvers: How, exactly, did the keyhole detach from the sinister needle and set off on its own adventures in the shadow-world we move through every day, assuming a revelatory power we likely could never fathom? You know?

CELLAR

On a winter afternoon, I went down to the cellar
to put away my work boots, and the old dreadnaught,

the one with only five strings and the faux ivory
inlay on the fret board. There was a pain in one side

of my neck – I don’t remember which one –
that felt as if it had been there for a hundred

and fifty years. In the cupboard under the stairs
were shelves of cherries and onions in jars,

and half-full bottles of whiskey from distilleries
shuttered during Prohibition. At least that’s how I heard

the spiders tell it, descending invisible threads
from my grandfather’s broken fishing rod.

April, 2021

A somewhat autobiographical poem, I wrote it very quickly, truly drafting it in less than ten minutes. So I must have been doing some pre-conscious work on it. The pain in my neck is real – and it’s the right side. It’d been bothering me since the pandemic blew up, and felt like it was going on endlessly. We do have a basement pantry we call the “root cellar,” stocked with my wife’s preserves. I also had in mind a cupboard under the cellar stairs at my aunt’s house. As a kid, I remember the decades-old liquor bottles I found there, covered with dust. Everything else in the poem just filled itself in basically while I sat back and watched.