poet, interviewer, musician, traveler
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every encounter is a mixture
of delight and regret
I’m pushing the big rock
up a steep hill
am I strong enough to let go?
will it roll over me?
my headphones block the sound of the train
as it carries me fa(r)ther away
past a hundred rectangles
divided into a thousand rectangles
I turn on Coltrane, sit back
watch the blurry trees
/ / /
19 April 2025
Washington D.C.
all aboard
a train is a good place
to write a poem
even a train that hasn’t left yet
is full of possibility
a train puts me at ease
no traffic, no tolls
no need to navigate
just ride the rails
until you get to your station
it’s a terrible metaphor for life
but my favorite way to travel
/ / /
19 April 2025
Charlottesville VA
mayflies
mayflies dead on the streets of Selma
mayflies dead on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
David and I are there to remember
to pay our respects, to see
but everywhere we look
the streets and sidewalks are covered
with drifts of mayfly carcasses
heaps of translucent white wings
uncountable numbers of corpses
we try not to step on them
it’s all but impossible
we walk with a sickening crunch
across that weighty bridge
emerging on the other side
two white people unscathed
on a field of the dead
/ / /
18 April 2025
Charlottesville VA
this place is nowhere
I have learned nothing
about this place
I know the route from home to work
from home to Wegmans
from home to downtown
when my partner drives back
to their other place
I don’t know which direction they go
most days I seem to be floating
like Fenchurch in the Adams book
never quite touching the ground
today someone from afar
told me I’m flourishing
my sister says my life is stable
my kids, well, I’m never sure about them
but me? I’m here but not here
like a main street façade
built for a movie
it looks real if you don’t get too close
don’t peek around the back
don’t see the beams
propping up the illusion
I’m a dusty western town
tumbleweeds blowing through
a short hop from the highway
that goes everywhere and nowhere
/ / /
17 April 2025
Charlottesville VA
abracadabra
no matter how many times I hear
the magic trick that was Art Tatum
I can never figure out how he did it
how his mind leapt as if he’d never
heard of the law of gravity
how his fingers found all those keys
with no eyes to guide them
how he took songs everybody knew
and blasted them into a million
glittering jewels of sound
he had an arm up each sleeve
with miraculous hands at the ends
here I sit, mouth open in wonder
grateful just to listen
/ / /
14 April 2025
Charlottesville VA
Black Saint Billy Harper is wailing 40-something years ago in some other city but tonight he’s filling the air in our bedroom in Charlottesville because earlier today at Melody supreme his record was on the wall and I remembered that time I interviewed him and his voice was so rich and resonant that it put mine to shame and that was already so long ago that I recall only impressions (not the Coltrane tune) and wow! this band is killing.
five decades
collapsed in an instant
black metaltail hummingbird
/ / /
12 April 2025
Charlottesville VA
Dishwasher At The Barricades
I made the mistake
of listening to headlines
while I washed the dishes tonight.
I’d been proud of myself
for washing them
rather than just getting into bed.
By the time I finished
I was enraged,
my heart pounding in my chest.
The antithesis of meditation.
It’s the Frodo Baggins of it all:
living through times
I’d have rather avoided,
chest full of a heart
that can’t look away.
I’m too cowardly for the big things.
I let my bosses silence me.
I hide behind the age-old fear
of getting yelled at.
I’m not a Willem van Spronsen.
Not an Alexander Berkman.
My hands shake
as I rinse the last glass,
set it rim-side-down
on the pile of clean dishes
in the drying rack.
I turn off the podcast
so I can write this poem.
/ / /
4/7/25
Charlottesville VA
In this post I talked about how I’ve recently taken up sketching, after believing for the better part of five decades that I couldn’t draw at all. Here are a few more recent sketches from this new and exciting adventure.
dawn chorus
we’ve sung for them
for a thousand years
but they’ve never
learned the words
/ / /
5 April 2025
Charlottesville VA
I’ve always said that I want to be an elderly person without having to live the part of life that leads up to it. Well, I’m 51 now, and so it seems like if I make it to “elderly,” I’m going to be doing it the old fashioned way. But it’s not going to be like I hoped. I don’t often think about what my life will actually look like when I’m old, because I have no savings and I’m not depending on any social safety net to keep me afloat. As far as I can tell, my options are to work till I die, or to work till I can’t then move back into a vehicle and use any Social Security that I might get just to eat, or to throw myself on the mercy of one of my sons. I guess the other option is to die in the Water Wars, but that one is harder to plan for. America!
Leave a Commentthe mysterious valley
there’s a mysterious valley
behind Lisa
I hadn’t noticed it until today
I guess I was too distracted
by the smile we’re told to look at
but there it is –
a path and a bridge
some mountains fading into mist
while Lisa sits there
daring us to look past her
/ / /
4 April 2025
Charlottesville VA
For John Breen
We’ll probably never know what he did
when he was overseas in a uniform.
He kept most of that pretty close to the chest.
In fact he kept most things pretty close to the chest.
He was a classic man of his era.
He served, he worked, he did what was required.
I once watched him eat two slices of pizza
and wash them down with a full glass of milk.
He was, if memory serves, the only person I ever knew
who preferred Wonder Bread to all other kinds.
I sat at his table one afternoon,
having decided to unburden my emotions
to this least likely of hearers.
When I was done, he told me
to get my head out of my ass.
He wasn’t wrong.
/ / /
31 March 2025
Charlottesville VA
For my Uncle John,
who passed away on
March 29, 2025.
I’m in my early 50s, and for all the time I’ve been alive and able to hold a writing instrument, I’ve believed I was bad at visual art. I always wished I could draw, especially when I got to high school and some of my classmates were talented artists. I’d try to draw the occasional cartoon and I was always unhappy with the results.
In later years, I became more serious about poetry, I had a couple poet friends who were also visual artists, and I was envious of the way their notebooks contained both their poems and their images.
I recently started using pencils again to write, and the other night I was on the couch and decided to try to sketch the stereo, which is helpfully rectangular.
I thought it was pretty poor, but Stephanie liked it. So did a few other people who saw it. This gave me a bit of confidence.
At work I grabbed some printer paper and a piece of card stock and made my own sketchbook:
I made another sketch of the stereo. Then I tried to sketch my less rectangular car, Marshmallow:
The proportions are clearly wrong but I still like it. This evening I tried a third sketch:
I did a bit of shading because I’m hella fancy.
And look, I’m no great artist or anything, but I quite literally spent 45+ years believing I didn’t know how to draw at all. I feel like I’ve unlocked a latent mutant ability. It’s exciting!
One Commenthush
a carpenter bee inspects the bird feeder
across the street, a neighbor mows short grass
there’s a woodpecker knocking in a tree behind me
the cat jumps up to say hi then bites my hand
I saw a video once about a man
who finds the last quiet places
I haven’t seen him around here
/ / /
28 March 2025
Charlottesville VA
Fred Astaire’s Sister
The crossword puzzle book –
which, let’s be honest,
is already a pretty old place to start –
has a clue asking for the name
of Fred Astaire’s sister.
As I pencil in ADELE,
I get that cozy feeling
that comes from a warm fire
on a snowy day
with an old movie playing.
There’s something oddly comforting
about knowing Fred’s sister’s name,
as there is about knowing Fred himself.
I was born in the era of record players
housed in credenzas, grew up
in the era of cassette tapes and then CDs,
and watched my kids come of age
at a time when every song ever recorded
is available at the touch of a pretend button.
But now it’s Sunday afternoon,
I’m listening to Horowitz on vinyl,
penciling in the name
of Fred Astaire’s sister,
and happy to be spanning the ages
with my wonder still intact.
/ / /
25 March 2025
Charlottesville VA