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…

“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,…

……………. All the world’s a stage,                    And all the men and women merely players;                   They have their exits and their entrances,                   And one man in his time plays…

      Down to the Bone If I could un-ring certain bells and un-wind time I would, but can’t, so instead, I’ll just ride this bucket of bones till the wheels fly off; till ball-joints grind and drop from sockets, till this xylophone of ribs riffs the music of the spheres, until my funny…

…..Why Being? What happens, happens before & after, every time, without fail, always— yet, is singular, is a one-note affair in a symphony of nows each moment of which then becomes before & after, simultaneously. If this seems confusing, blame time, or life, or God which, in particular, has been a widespread explanation of the…

A Simple Ontology maybe flower petals are held to stems by thought and the wind’s a counter-thought that plucks and sets them elsewhere in the grass to grow in contemplative resolution beside my notion of a grub-pulling crow maybe the wind itself is a palpable bright idea, something about motion and the abhorrence of vacuums, something about…

Eternal Day-long Sum The music of what happens begins with a bottom line of drums, as in the foundation of a house, percussion— the thumps of bass in sync with a wind of horns: baritone, bassoon, tuba; and in the whispers of brushed snares, the round tones of tympany, and in the rests between —the…

A Small Universe of Suns Here we have a small universe of suns. Behind, a black hole is endeavoring to swallow them. The suns are ringed by nebulae which are no more than clouds of gas and dust, collections of atoms, as we all are. But, in Its capricious way, the Lord of everything has now…

“All humans are, genetically, 99.9% identical” ………..—Roger Highfield, Science Editor 99% Identical “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” a poet said imagining friendly neighbors working their way along that which stood between resetting fallen gneiss and granite loaves and balls fallen to each to keep their wall intact while one questioned the irony of…

A Cornucopia of Elegies as clear as time when the air was green and tenderfeet knew the ballet of beginning, a tern-like teen on one leg in the surf of a sea, a swift on a draft of blinks in the hour of someday-but-not-now— . time is a cornucopia of elegies, the master of poets complicit since the word…