poet, interviewer, musician, traveler
Worth It
for John
The scar on my left knee
is from crashing a BMX bike
I was only riding to be your dad.
/ / /
17 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 27 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentTreasure Chest
for Bernie
I cradled you in my arms as the anesthetist
held the tiny mask over your face.
Your soft eyelids lowered.
You were cooing as I handed you to the doctor.
It was the gentlest sound I’d ever heard.
Parting from it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
He took you through the double doors.
I returned on shaky legs to the waiting room.
/ / /
15 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 25 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a Comment
Eventualities
We talked about what would happen
when one of them dies.
“All The Things You Are” is playing.
I have closed the curtains.
Anyway when one of them dies.
Is what we talked about.
By the way that song is over.
The neighbor is mowing again.
The thing is, see, when one of them dies.
I don’t know the name of this next song.
Perhaps I should have another iced tea.
There will come a day when it’s over.
We talked about this.
/ / /
10 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 20 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
I got into Star Trek
but he was already gone
claimed by age & the ocean
/ / /
7 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 17 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentPetruchio
We were all supposed to meet back in 2019, but
it didn’t work out and then a lot of other things
didn’t work out and then the part of “we”
that was me and somebody else turned into “I,”
but then we finally met anyway (most of us)
and cooked steaks and potatoes and corn
and watched a play and it was worth the wait.
/ / /
6 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 16 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a Commentanother normal family
on vacation / behind the boys
a sperm whale’s skeleton
/ / /
6 August 2023
Shenandoah National Park
This is poem 15 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Nurture
He was so small.
I threw him onto the bed, then
remembered the smack
of a fist against my jaw.
I looked at my own hands,
horrified.
/ / /
4 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 14 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentIn The Driveway In The Tucson Foothills There Were
a series of stones arranged in a semicircle
eight or so chairs, in two groups,
with white ribbon to create an aisle
eight or so people, most of whom were related
to one or the other of the celebrants,
plus Dave and Priscilla
some low cacti, which would come into play
after the ceremony when the bride
stepped out of the stone semicircle
and straight into the sharp spines
a CD boombox, probably the groom’s,
playing a Nat King Cole Trio CD,
definitely the groom’s
a justice of the peace in a dark suit,
with glasses and a mustache, who
turned out to take only cash,
causing the best man to ask the groom’s
grandfather if he had any on him,
which, thankfully, he did
two young people who barely knew
what they were doing, who could not see
that it wouldn’t last, who stood in the
semicircle of stones and hoped
that would be enough
/ / /
3 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 13 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentParamnesia
There was a story that,
going around a corner,
the passenger door
of my uncle’s red
Mustang convertible
flew open,
and my cousin,
who was not
wearing a seat belt,
tumbled out of the car,
only to grab on
to the seat belt
he hadn’t been wearing
to stop himself
being hurled
to the pavement,
but I now think
I made this up.
/ / /
2 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 12 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentSanctuary
The interior of the church is dimly lit.
It’s a weekday afternoon, so the building
is empty, except for two people.
One is a teenage boy.
He has glasses too big for his face,
and the same haircut he’s had since he was five.
He’s wearing clothes chosen by his mother.
The other person is an older woman.
Honestly, she’s probably in her forties,
but that’s old to him.
He is crying.
In those days it was hard for him to cry.
Not because he didn’t have reason.
She has one arm around his shoulders,
there in the front pew.
The sanctuary smells faintly of incense,
a scent that never truly leaves.
Sanctuary. In earlier days the door of a church
was a shield from persecution.
The boy isn’t running from the law, though.
He’s trying to come to grips with abuse
and undiagnosed depression and a total lack
of any means of escape.
Beyond the heavy door is the heavier town.
He asked to be sent away to boarding school,
but his parents said no.
There’s nothing she can do, really,
but tell him it’ll be okay.
She’s wrong, but at least she says it.
/ / /
1 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 11 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentHost Dad
I had never seen anyone stretch before.
Deep knee bends and rotations of the arms.
Folding at the waist and swinging side to side.
Each afternoon, as I hop down to the sidewalk
from the low wall in front of the station,
as I feel the delightful pull in my thigh muscles,
I think of his morning stretches.
/ / /
31 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 10 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentCalls
On the weekends my grandma made her calls.
She called the daughters and the nieces
and, in earlier years, the brothers or their wives.
She collected the latest news and gossip,
spreading it from call to call like a
carefully coifed version of the internet.
The calls were strong thread, knitting together
a small and far-flung family that had once
shared Sunday dinners in Lenox, and birthdays,
and holidays, but now mostly shared cards.
The women she used to call
are now grandmothers themselves,
and they talk on the weekends still.
I make my calls, too, to my sons
and my sister, and to cousins and aunts,
and to the found family I’ve gathered
during this strange life.
“One of these days,” my first therapist said,
“you’ll have to let go of Lenox.”
Maybe, but not today.
/ / /
30 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 9 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentMarge
My “lunch lady” voice is, to some degree, channeling her.
Other than FDR, and Burgess Meredith as the Penguin,
she was the only person I ever saw using a cigarette holder.
I remember her with a perm, with deep crinkles around her eyes,
and with oversized glasses on a chain around her neck.
(Uncle Jack would be in the next room,
monitoring the local first responders on his scanner.
In his younger days he’d wake the kids when the fire bell rang,
and they’d all rush off in pajamas and jackets to see the fire.)
She was a housekeeper at a swanky resort
in the swanky town our non-swanky family called home.
And that’s it, really. She worked and married (twice)
and raised kids and had thoughts and feelings and dreams,
but to me she’s a brief series of half-remembered sketches,
as I will be someday to people I can’t yet imagine meeting.
/ / /
29 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 8 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentOur Bodies, Ourselves
I came back from a week in Plymouth,
where my grandparents had been plying me
with Ring Dings and unlimited TV.
I got out of their car and saw
the look of horror on my mom’s face.
Every night for weeks she made me
jog around our neighborhood
to lose the weight I’d gained on the trip.
I was six, maybe seven, years old.
I finished lunch before writing this.
I logged every calorie into an app.
In six weeks I’ll be 50.
It never goes away.
/ / /
28 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 7 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentNo Ice Cream
I am walking on a sidewalk
down a hill
toward an ice cream shop
that has a wall of glass brick.
I am holding the hand of a woman
whose face I can’t see.
I am very little.
My arm is upraised
because we are holding hands,
as if I’m asking to be noticed.
When we arrive at the ice cream shop,
the glass brick fills my field of vision.
It is both mundane and magical,
like the wall of a ruined castle.
This memory contains no ice cream.
After years of tests and probes,
it turned out it wasn’t the dairy
that was the problem.
/ / /
24 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem #3 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a Comment