Select Poems in Print

Gardening
Kestrel: Issue 50, Winter 2023-2024

Mild winter, acorns not buried under snow,
no need for squirrels to access the cache
they’d stored underground in random spots,
and so, come spring, oak shoots popped up
all over her garden. She started plucking
those poking through the creeping phlox
in full pink and violet bloom hanging over
the wall along the driveway. Hard work,
the new growth having burst through
their seed shells, the husks refusing to cede
easily to her tugs. She should have caught
them earlier. Yet, she was able to render
the effort near-effortless by attaching names
to the weeds she ripped out by the roots:
Mr. Speaker of the House and Mr. Senate
Minority Leader; Your Honorable Associate
Justice; then sweeping through the lesser
lights she judged to be too much in their
element, but actually out of place, not in it
for the common good. She extracted one after
another until she’d amassed a considerable
pile of would-be-righteous oaks that, when
they grew up, would have thought themselves
upright citizens in the community. All this
without using toxic chemicals. If only.



Painting
Atlanta Review, Fall/Winter: Poetry 2023

He kept up his long walks by the river
into autumn, wild asters on the bank
thriving in the cold, nearby tall spikes
of hollyhocks well past, except a few
lingering blooms. The milkweed hung on
stubbornly, refused to yield their seeds.
Years ago, he and his mother would
gather stalks after the pods had opened
and the fluff had blown away. He painted
the pods’ insides mostly silver or gold,
sometimes poppy red, her favorite fall
color, arranged the dried plants in vases
for sale at the church bazaar. Years ago.
He still paints them. Now, nothing but red.



Goatland
Tar River Poetry: Volume 63, Number 1, Fall 2023

The thing that particularly stands out
about the recently completed U.S. census
of goats is their extreme concentration
in the State of Texas. Not that there
aren’t more, best seen by piling 500
of the animals into a single light grey dot
on the map, darkened spots then appearing
in California, Arkansas, Illinois, and a few
others, but there is a large area of Texas
that is black, no doubt reflecting Texans’
changing habits regarding the mohair
they wear, the meat they eat, the milk
they drink, and the cheese they make.
Not to speak of the grass and brush they
need to keep trimmed. In one place alone,
goats outnumber people 22:1. Presumably,
polls will soon be taken to add goats to
the voter rolls, the state having become
too blue for some goatherders’ tastes.
Goats are making their mark on the local
culture. Imagine a proposal to fit special
seats for the wooly creatures in theaters.
And that video game, Goat Simulator,
with goats yelling like humans, a mere
reflection of humans yelling like goats
in the halls of government these days.



Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe
California Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2, Summer 2023

The conditions are right—a cloudless dome
not cluttered with pinpricks of light, dusk still
collecting itself into night. A view
clear to the horizon, my gaze a full
sweep of one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.
Overhead, the Summer Triangle as
sharp as I’ve ever found it. To the south,
Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars are aligned,
maybe an omen that the unrest growing
in the world might play itself out before
its tidal waves sweep away everything
we hold dear. In the grand scheme of things,
they’re mere ripples in the fabric of the
universe, but not to us here on Earth.



Child Coloring in a War Zone
Grey Sparrow Press, Issue 40, July 2022

Sitting on the stone steps of her broken home,
mother and father already gone,
only her grandmother left, the girl colors
the jigsaw of the girl in her coloring book,
who’s sitting on the steps of her own broken home
on an empty street. She likes that each piece
is a number because she’s always liked numbers.
She fills in the 1 with sky-blue, then 2 and 3
with leaf-green, wonders what to do
with the number she doesn’t recognize, an 8
fallen on its side. Looking at the plus sign,
she imagines the crosshairs of a sniper
turning her into a minus. Out of crayons and hope,
she, too, will become a number in a war
she’s been told is not a war. At another 8,
right-side up, her age, she stops, at last
understanding the number 0 she left blank,
her alone in a world no longer here, the shadow
seeping down the page blood-red.



You Choose to Die in Your Own Bed
Third Wednesday Magazine, July 2022

          —​in memory of my sister-in-law, 1965-2016

The doctors honored your request to stay
at home in your own bed. You chose
the side you’ve always slept on, near
the window through which, when you are
conscious for moments that no longer
linger, you can watch the remaining leaves—​
everything else just branches and twigs—​
detach in the wind. Now you hear wings,
the birds also on their way. It’s the passing
of fall, this final falling away, leaf by leaf,
bird by bird, and you, pound by pound,
your body nearly weightless now, skin
drawn tight over bones almost porous,
you light enough to be able, at last, to fly.



Particle and Wave
Poet Lore / Cruising at Sixty to Seventy (Red Hen Press, 2014)

          particles have no meaning as isolated entities,
          but can only be understood as interconnections…
                                        —Erwin Schrodinger

You and I were doing what we do best—​
throwing stones—​
this time from the side
of a country bridge into the reservoir,
each arcing under the forces
of physics until impact, the consequence
spreading in ripples, the stone
become invisible in the bottom muck,
its presence propagating
across the surface,
as our presence does
to the fabric of something less grand
than space-time. Then yours and mine
cast together, landing in different spots,
their wavelets colliding,
passing through each other,
cohering in some places, canceling in others,
the pattern richer for the two
than one…    then in our excitement,
each of us tossing a handful at once,
the pattern becoming richer still,
not still at all, moving out into the world—​
children, siblings, parents, friends,
adding up to something grand.
​
​

Remembrance Day, 11/11/11
Virginia Quarterly Review: Volume 88, Issue 3, Summer 2012

Uniform and medals in place, he began to recite:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…
I let him continue, word for word to the end,
pausing only for proper punctuation.
Perfect, just as in his prep school days. Blue ribbon.
Forest of Compiègne, I said. Not Agincourt.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…
He proceeded through the rest of Flanders Fields alone.
I asked, Can the dead be happy?,

knowing, as I always do, what he’ll say:
Not unless they see sunrise and sunset.
At eleven, the sun was almost as high as it would get.
They remembered my father
at the chapel, asked how he was doing.
And as he had the year before, he told them
about his days in flight training, the time
he flew over his prep school’s football field,
almost touching down, almost not making it
back up, goalposts nearly nicking a wing.

Back then, Henry V was firmly in his place,
Lieutenant Colonel McCrae, too,
but not me, not even an inkling though he knew
his bride-to-be. Hey, Dad, do you remember
meeting Mum, I asked, and he joked:
When they heard I’d been given a commission,
they surrendered. So did she, I thought.
When we came out after the service, we saw
that clouds had gathered on the day,
the sun strafing them in a few spots.

Over a spot of lunch, we talked about what he could
remember, pockets of recollection
in odd places and times, his unusual condition unkindly
rendering some of the unforgettable lost
while leaving much of the forgettable found.
He recalled the birthday gift for his brother
who guessed what it was after he’d asked and was told
only that it looked like a hammer.
I asked if he recalled hiking with me, navigations
by means of compass and map to find

unnamed mountain ponds he could call his own.
He still did. And also the time he and his brother
set a field of brush ablaze with their father’s
magnifying glass. But not the birth of his son
on the coldest day on record or the party at which
he met my mother who’d come with
another man. After an early tea, we drove to the lake
and watched the sky’s coals burn down.
He began to recite Henry V again.
It was Saint Crispin’s Day. He was king.



Billy and Stephen and Me
Alaska Quarterly Review: Vol. 1-2, Spring/Summer 2011

          —​for Billy Collins and Stephen Dunn

Billy would tell you about the little flame
at the end of his pen while he rocks in the hammock
listening to wild turkeys rustle last autumn’s leaves
as they run toward and away from the stream.
Stephen would tell you he’s like the turkeys,
unsure whether he’s coming or going,
how that confusion has a certain beauty
which can’t be uprooted once it takes hold, and I—​
I’m the one in the hammock, reading both
on this first warm day of spring, coming from one
to the other, going back, pausing every few pages
to let the words plant themselves,
and thinking how hard it was last fall
to drill holes in each urn’s composite base
so this year’s flowers wouldn’t drown—​
likely red, white, and pink impatiens again,
because habits don’t break easily
and those flowers crave shade. Billy would say
there’s too much shade in the world,
Stephen that we cast too much on ourselves.



Half-Finished Bridge
Southern Poetry Review, Volume 46, Issue 1 / In Confidence (Red Hen Press, 2011) 
 
No important work to do today, I think,
as I lie in the hammock one last time
before storing it for winter,
just a few chores around the yard—​
deck chairs to be stacked and stashed away
and the lawn raked despite the pears
and oaks hanging on to their green.

Stamped on the pencil I’m using,
first snow falling on the half-finished bridge,
now as in Bashō’s time,
the halfway done possibly a road
to nowhere, like the wars we shouldn’t start
and the marriages we can’t finish.
But he must’ve meant that I find myself

amidst the season’s first flurries,
leaves collecting at my feet
as I rock in the wind, writing to my father
that I’m grateful he’s still alive
and there’s time to erect the rest of the trestle
and walk together to the other side,
light snow falling on our backs.

​

Problem #193
New Orleans Review: Volume 37.2, 2011

It was Banach’s wife who gave them the journal
they called The Scottish Book so they wouldn’t
keep losing the solutions they wrote on the marble
tabletops in the Scottish Café, those famous

mathematicians in Lvov who kept a log
of the solvable and unsolvable, as you do now
in your journal with the marble pattern on its cover.
I’ve been thinking about Problem #193,

Banach’s puzzle involving a mathematician
who carries two boxes of matches,
one in his left pocket and one in his right,
each with M matches at the start. To light his pipe,

he chooses a box at random, removes a match
and strikes it. Does this every time until he finds
one of the boxes empty. But how would he know?
When he reaches for another match and finds

the box bare? I’ve been thinking this could be us.
Not the times we’re lying in bed bantering,
when you keep talking into the silence until you
realize my last match has already been spent

and you still have N things to tell me. It’s after
another fight has burned down almost to silence,
when you wonder aloud whether we began
with equal amounts each. Whether anything’s left.



In Confidence
Southern Review: Winter 2010

Why does leaning on the rail of a deck
and looking out over layers of hills
as buds burst through their coverings
evoke the big questions? Like why
are we making such a mess of it all?

Ask Sunday’s dissonant choir of birds
in the newspaper’s Week in Review,
always a replay of the same
failures. Lots of cartoons there
to remind us that making fun of ourselves

is a start but not an end. Take today—​
though it could be any day—​
a young girl with a bow in her hair
asking her bald-headed ex-VP granddad
to teach her new dog a trick,

so he grasps the pup by its scruff,
and pours a glass of water down its throat
while screaming, Speak! Speak!
I know we should, but it’s so hard
to feel tortured out here

watching the oak unfold its leaves.
Besides, waterboarding sounds like
an amusement park ride,
what you might do with your kids
at Typhoon Lagoon. I know I would

give up secrets. That’s why
you should never trust me with one,
though I must admit
that your brief affair with a colleague
will always be safe with me.



Richter 7.8
Tar River Poetry: Volume 49, Number 1, Fall 2009

          Dark energy and dark matter describe proposed solutions
          to as yet unresolved gravitational phenomena. So far as
          we know, the two are distinct.
                                        —​Robert Caldwell, cosmologist,
                                        SciAm.com, August 28, 2006

Such a waste to spend a life thinking
about the impossible to figure out, like where the spirit
    goes when detached from its body.

An alternative universe perhaps. That’s where
dark matter enters, not how physicists hypothesize,
but the way it casts light on everyday affairs.

I, for one, am stuck on the question
of how dark matter and energy can be separate and distinct
when plain mass and energy are equivalent.

We’re told we need both types of darkness
to fill what’s missing, yet one pulls us together
while the other propels us apart.

What we can’t find in our world must be
the substance of another,
worlds that look to each other for what’s missing,

each a resting place for the other’s souls,
an answer to why any god would allow a quake
to bury nine hundred children under a school,

what’s so incomprehensible here on earth
maybe making sense in the place where all those students
have found new flesh to wear.
​


In Spring, Mathematics Are Yellow
New Delta Review: Volume 22, Issue 2, Summer 2005

I’m sure there’s something fractal
in forsythia, not so much its chaotic sprays,
which are probably not parabolic curves
(and certainly not catenaries
hanging under the weight of blossoms),

but the contours of the bush, branch, and flower
that are shaped like a year in my life
or its day or hour. Up close, I can see
each bloom has four petals, thus proving
the limits of Fibonacci’s reach,

his long arm able to paint five
on the pansies I potted for my wife, but not
across the street where our neighbor buried
perennial memories of his wife ten years ago.
How odd never to have seen the daffodils

as hexagrams before. They die too soon,
unlike the dandelions that dot my yard—​
too many to fight, yet finite, unlikely Fibonacci,
though undoubtedly fractal (or so Mandelbrot
would claim), always inappropriate

for bouquets of reconciliation, firmly rooted
in the life of my lawn, while the lawn of my life
goes to seed faster than an exponential plot,
and all the quantized fluff
tunnels into next year’s plans, like it or not.



Chemotherapy
Hurricane Review, Volume I, Issue 1, 2003

From the window, she can see the breeze
riffle the forsythia’s yellow spray,
and near the willow, her favorite magnolia,
a pointillistic pink-and-white pastel
not yet painted over by leaves.

Sometime between the wind taking
no note of bare branches
and the forest hiding behind its green,
her apple trees will become giant
dandelions gone to seed.

In this fragile equilibrium, an ether
between too many and too few,
she lies down beside her sleeping lover
to stroke his back, and almost forgets
about this time next year.