“The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely covered by oceans, but to link two amino acids together to make a protein, you have to remove water.” And that would have been impossible if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—literally a beachhead—to get started.” —geobiologist, Joseph…

If you talk about it, it’s not the Tao If you name it, it’s something else What can’t be named is eternal Naming splits the eternal to smithereens ……………… —Lao Tzu (sort of), 6th Century BC Lao Tzu’s Lament at first I think, I’ve got it! then I think, Ah no, that’s not it I…

Approaching the Cold Solstice with J. Kepler we’re falling deeply in —in as deeply as we get before we spin again along an ellipse’s rim to a more congenial spot for blood and breath what the astronomical survival odds (our outer limits) are, who knows? but time is short by late report listening now to ersatz…

Rear View In reflection, the world’s not just a shifty place, but odd really, the unexpectedness of it, it’s sudden winds & wild humans shifting as I’ve aged, sliding from simply familiar to things with torn edges, never fully knowable, open-ended, dangerous, yet held together tentatively by threads of love and unexpected revelations of beauty…

Brevity I need a good poem lifespan-short, one I can shoe-horn between instants which in that pinch says so much I’ll understand long and short by the depth of calluses built upon my brain— but it’s not happening I’m already up to nine lines so it’s too late for brevity— what I want is one…

Cast your bread on the waters: for you shall find it after many days. …………………………… —Ecclesiastes Bread Upon the Water Oh, the young don’t keep and the old just go, and the keeper of the sheep casts a long, long shadow, and your song won’t come where your life won’t go, so throw your bread on…

Just a Little Time Just a little time with you upon the gleaming sea Just a little time will do and the time will make us free And yes, the sky is our bed tonight Just a little company can make a prairie small And to hear a word or two resounding down the hall…

It Could be Now . . . I feel a cup slip from my grip then I see it heading for the floor . . . ………………. —it could be now I see the morning trees, the jittering leaves of aspens in a breeze above our tool shed dancing. . . ………………. —it could be now I’m…

One Thing Common, simple thoughts are hard to place in deep context as they rush our minds and hold them fast. So, we don’t look in, but out, around, and past. Too small to be big, small-thoughts squeeze between lines suggesting, hinting, asking, & telling as the tale unfolds. To big to be small, they…

Alternate Paradise ……. All poems hint death though some strive not to mention it decked as they are in bright intentions to make it moot, but it can’t be helped, it looms over every word no matter how light ……. No matter how fresh and light a poem may seem it can’t resist death’s ballast, can’t…

Conversation Boat: ……… —Your slope is russet and graceful; seems soft. Land: ……… —It is. I see it echoes the grace of your gunnels, stem to stern. Boat: ……… —We approach your still grace, having been upon water all day. Land: ……… —Who is that with you, the who with articulating sticks? Boat: ……… —He rows, he brings me…

Boy in an Apple Tree Sun through leaves throws shadows on his face as if a dappled stallion, alone in time, a tick, a heartbeat, far out in time elliptical and long as the orbit of Uranus— eighty-four of this boy’s life-to-be in years to come Heartbeat sustains him in a capsule with companions in…

Up Sampson Hill —on the 50th anniversary of friends  There be hippies in those days, in the woods and Woodstocks, it’s been said, and in basements listening to the time’s music played and sung or spun from black vinyl discs Dylan     The Who     The Cream     The Dead and melodious women lamenting a paved paradise or singing gratitude…

Coin what I get when I feel its face in relief against hard ground: words and numbers circling, a date, a motto standing proud of the baseline of this place eventually I’ll come to it as I never had before: its edge the never-really-known-razor-precipice which rings three-sixty around keeping me in world like a coin flat, finite,…

Bubble of a Guess and, Love Would Help —on the Ukraine affair, Gaza, and lunatics The saying is: there’s no time like the present the truth is: there’s no time but the present the rub is: what to do with the present? There’s no reliable answer to that it’s all conjecture that’s what we’re stuck…

Brevity What I need a good poem, a poem lifespan-short, a poem I can shoe-horn between instants, a poem that, in a pinch, says so much I’ll understand the long and short of it by the depth of calluses building on my brain. But that’s not happening —count ’em, I’m already up to eight lines,…

Ode to Cells Before metaphorical allusions we are warm and wet. Seas surge within us. In tiny cytoplasmic bays, tiny ships of golgi moor near lysosome cays enclosed by permeable breakwater membranes all which rise and fall with nucleo tides ebbing and flowing through generations rendering noses, pug or aquiline, and eyes skybright, or in…

When Bach was a Busker in Brandenburg When Bach was a busker playing for humble coin he’d set up his organ in the middle of a square regardless of pigeons, ignoring the squirrels who sat poised at its edges waiting for their daily bread, and work to build its impossible structure of intricacies, assembling its…

If you talk about it, it’s not Tao If you name it, it’s something else What can’t be named is eternal Naming splits the eternal to smithereens ………………………….. —Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC Lao Tzu’s Lament At first I think, I’ve got it— Then I think, Oh no, that’s not it. I think, it’s more…

The town where I grew up had a river running through it, as does the town does where I find myself at the other extreme of a journey. There was a particular spot in that river where it tumbled over rocks through a narrow in a raging white flume until it settled quietly in a…