poet, interviewer, musician, traveler
How To Make An America
• 1 part genocide
• 1 part slavery
• 1 part apartheid
• 1 part supremacy
Heat for 400 years
in a pressure cooker,
until the steam
escapes the valve.
Then, holding
the cooker at arm’s length,
carry it to a bombed-out
hospital or school,
set it in the foyer,
take 20 paces back,
wait.
///
6 November 2024
Charlottesville, VA
Tonight, My Heart Is North
1.
Swallows, bat-like,
swoop over the sycamore.
A low breeze raises blades
of grass beside our blanket.
The sounds of South Sudan
mingle with the clinks
of leashes and collars
and the sneakered footfalls of walkers.
The cat chases imaginary prey
up the trunk of the tree,
squirrels passing unnoticed
mere feet away.
2.
A break with routine:
I’ll forego a shower
so as not to miss
the sound of the rain.
I waited till the small hours
to close the bedroom window —
preferring a damp carpet
to the loss of the waterfall.
Since I was a kid
I’ve loved the car wash,
the sense of enclosure,
of safety in the flood.
This pre-dawn morning,
my bed is my transport —
from its shelter
I adore this world of water.
3.
It’s been raining for days —
today, warnings of a tornado,
but none appeared.
“If one comes I’ll run out,
let it take me,” I said.
“Over my dead body,”
they said, “I’ll knock you out.”
Tonight, my heart is north:
on the shores of the Memphramagog,
where a skunk slithers
around my legs;
on the beach at Provincetown,
kneeling in the sand
to photograph the wooden Buddha
I’d carried in my backpack;
after a movie on North Street in Pittsfield,
stopping to capture the sun
as it sinks between the buildings.
Part of me is always there —
walking the rocky beaches or
breathing in the Berkshires air or
looking over the waist-high wall at Quebec or
pulling a smooth stone from the edge of the Housatonic.
That ground — the land of my birth —
captured me a half-century ago.
It has never let me go.
I never want it to.
/ / /
September 2024
Charlottesville VA
Perhaps Hummingbirds
Perhaps there are hummingbirds —
on days when the burnweed isn’t blowing;
or when the workers in their tees and jeans
and steel-toed Redwings aren’t heaving
detritus into the temporary dumpster
with the Maximum Fill Limit sign;
or when the neighbor kids aren’t yelling “car!”
as they clomp down the street in their Crocs;
or when the cat is indoors rather than roaming
the front yard on his oft-tangled leash —
but I’ve never seen ’em.
/ / /
23 September 2024
Charlottesville VA
A Poem About How We Set Our Sights On One Thing
But Then Life Conspires To Deliver Something Else
A man and his dog stare out at the infinite universe:
desktop wallpaper on a computer monitor,
grey cubicle in a nondescript office.
/ / /
20 September 2024
Charlottesville VA
Up Late Reading Galway Kinnell
Up late – or at least late for me –
I lie on my stomach reading Galway Kinnell,
wondering at the lives I could have lived
if only I’d run away at 14, or
gotten on that plane, or been more
comfortable alone, or finished that degree,
or kept any one of a number of jobs, or
done the thing people thought I should do,
rather than what I did which was often
weird – you have to admit – and which
finds me up late, reading Galway Kinnell,
wondering at the lives I could have lived.
/ / /
14 September 2024
Charlottesville VA
Sunday & Monday
Pop songs in the tattoo shop.
All power to the people.
High tops splash color
like the mycelia on your arm.
Text: a break-up far away;
nothing is promised.
•
The next day:
Sacramento 12-string.
Cat wrapped around the bird bath.
Flannel season has arrived.
The neighbor going
wherever it is she goes.
•
Help me light this fuse.
I want to set fire
to the past
so I can use the flames
to light the way forward.
/ / /
8-9 September 2024
Scottsville and Charlottesville, VA
Precursor
Coltrane and Ellington.
Two mugs of chai.
The cat is in the hostas.
A simple morning.
We eat avocado toast,
pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
speaks of revolution.
/ / /
8 September 2024
Charlottesville VA
Considering
I’ve been feeling old.
The skin on my legs is rough and itching.
I’ve forgotten how to sleep.
I gained back half the weight I’d lost,
stopped walking everywhere.
My right foot aches near the big toe,
even with my cool retro sneakers on.
This morning I sat in my rocking chair
on the porch, eyes closed, hands clasped
over my (too ample) belly,
breathing in and out at a measured pace
as a catbird rasped in the neighbor’s tree.
I do these things mostly out of habit,
pulling meaning from repetition,
from not stopping.
Now a jay is crying
in a different neighbor’s tree
as I sit rocking, eyes open,
hands unclasped,
thinking about the next cup of tea.
/ / /
1 September 2024
Charlottesville VA
buzz chirp hum
the conductor’s invisible baton
4:45 a.m.
/ / /
31 August 2024
Charlottesville VA
Leave a CommentTorch-bearer
Late at night, reading about Ammon Hennacy —
wondering how to live a life of purpose.
It’s easy to say, “I was born at the wrong time,”
as if there isn’t work to do now.
I feel disconnected from most things,
yet hope bubbles up like a spring in my mind.
Which forge offers the best chance
of producing a sword that vanquishes melancholy?
My son reads Octavia Butler.
I’m not ready to pass the torch,
even if it burns my hand.
/ / /
8/24/24
Charlottesville VA
Four For Monday Morning
I am spectacularly bored.
Perhaps there will be
a thunderstorm this afternoon.
*
“Supplication” is playing.
Jerry weaves in and out of
Bob’s rhythm.
*
There’s a kitten at home.
Here in this fluorescent cube
there is only me.
*
At the edge of my vision
is something that’s been coming
for a long time now.
///
29 July 2024
Charlottesville VA
I’m Even In Love With Your Dog
River runs to grab a tennis ball —
he yanks it out of the air on one hop
like a 19th-century ballplayer.
And then, because he’s yours,
he drops it beside a second ball
and goes back and forth between then.
Eventually he chooses, carries the winner over,
waits, tensed, for it to be thrown again.
/ / /
18 June 2024
Charlottesville VA
Science Fact
It was probably a bullfrog.
It was most likely a heron.
It was definitely a bat.
It might have been a peacock.
One thing I’m sure of,
one thing I know to be true,
is that in this whole wide world
the person for me is you.
/ / /
11 June 2024
Charlottesville VA
Palestine
I stopped writing poems
because there is no way
to order these lines
to make you care
when the photos
and the videos
haven’t.
/ / /
6 June 2024
Charlottesville VA
back to a solitary toothbrush
/ / /
27 May 2024
Charlottesville VA