Selected Poems Online and in Print

Around an Oakwood Fire
Wild Roof Journal: Issue 33, Spring 2026
 
Sitting around an oakwood fire at the end of October
after a day of canoeing in the Laurentian Mountains,
our T-bone steaks grilled to perfection, we three
cavemen wondered about our distant origins, whether
we all hailed from one place on another continent
and then migrated here, or popped up at different times
in different spots around the globe, all our questions
readily answered with a little research to refresh what
our younger minds once knew. Then the question
of what exactly we descended from, one of us asking,
“Doesn’t it depend on what it means to be human?”
We suspected that our ancestors were also tribal, in it
just for themselves, and with well-defined enemies.
We wondered why evolution stalled, at least for some.
 
 

 All of It, All the Way, All the Time
Misfit Magazine: No. 41, Fall 2025
 
Driving back home from my step-son’s in-laws’
wooded retreat in the Catskill Mountains
after a fine dinner with friends and family,
I followed his directions for a rural route
I’d never traveled and soon found myself
on a winding descent with sweeping S-turns
difficult on a dark night to make out clearly,
having to continually flick down my brights
while turning the wheel as oncoming cars
approached. But it was the bullying F-150
pickup trucks following me, traveling above
the speed limit and tailgating, that turned this
journey from hair-raising to life-threatening
with no place to pull off the road and let
the pursuers go by, forever hoping they might,
all of it coming to a head at a 90º right turn
marked 5 mph that I had to take at 15 mph
and swing fully into the opposing lane,
praying that no other vehicles would be there.
The two trucks, virtually glued together, finally
turned off, undoubtedly hooting all the way.
As soon as I could, I stopped in the parking lot
of a village restaurant, put my head down
on the wheel, realized that for too many of us,
this is what daily existence has become--
the descent, the S-turns, the speed, the bullying--
no longer just story, not solely metaphor.
Out of control, all of it, all the way, all the time.
 
 
​
Wild Rice and Heron
American Poetry Journal: Issue 20, October 2025
 
You recognize a swamp when you find yourself in one,
not by the skunk cabbage, the barely moving water,
the trees that have chosen to put down their roots
in this place, not even by the delicate ferns thriving
in the shade on the gently sloping banks rising from
the central creek or stream or brook, whatever it’s called,
 
but the circumstance from which you can’t paddle your
way out, a situation you can’t leave, yet can’t stay in.
You find yourself slogging through muck, even along
marked trails, because someone forgot to build planked
platforms to navigate from one dry patch to the next,
you having to do that yourself day by day. The wetlands
 
are too wet, but not wet enough to float the canoe you
are willing to make to extricate yourself. After all, it’s
a swamp, not a marsh you could abide with its body
of water nearby that’s not murky—river, lake, or pond.
Low-lying flora—pink honeysuckle, yellow flag iris,
reeds and wild rice—and fauna to keep you company,
 
not just those long, thin, black water snakes that bite.
You might spot baffled beavers going about their work
toppling young birches for their house, rows of painted
turtles sunning themselves on logs. Gulls, red-winged
blackbirds, purple martins, and if you’re lucky, a white
crane or great blue heron lurking among the grasses.
 
 

 Not Yet
Hawai’i Pacific Review: September 11, 2025
 
Cracked pottery houses the pink begonias,
hairline fracture not yet grown large enough
to cleave the pot in two, the soil drained
of its moisture, but not yet spilled, blossoms
not yet wilted. Away from the fissure,
blue petals beneath the surface’s glaze,
clusters of three, detached feathers from
a blue jay no doubt, no longer nearby,
but likely not yet deceased. A bee alights,
draws from the nectary, picks up pollen
from sticky stamens and hopes it can find
pistils to pollinate. The sun votes no,
passes through a cleft in the clouds, slips out
of the blue. The nation, too, waits to heal.
 
 
 
Halfway
(accepted as The Importance of Halfway)
The Montreal Review: August 2025
 
Used to be the inn between two towns,
the place to rest when the journey was long,
and now it’s a house for a stay before
returning to normal life. When a journey
seems too long to complete, we break it into
segments, halfway becoming the goal
 
to render the rest feasible, a psychology
to trick ourselves into thinking that the whole
is achievable. Still, the rest is also a trek,
its halfway point becoming the next marker,
and so on, each remaining part only
half the last. We never make it to the end,
 
so the mathematical conundrum goes,
the fallacy in logic that each portion takes
the same time. As parents, we keep
telling our children they are halfway there,
wherever there might actually be
in that moment. For us, if that spot is where
 
we feel adjusted to our life situation,
the end state may not be obvious or desirable,
the ultimate target elusive, uncertainty
all but certain. Of one thing we can be sure--
at some point, we will find ourselves
halfway to our demise, just never know when.
 


​Trespassers Will be Fed to Snapping Turtles
bluevilla.org/poetry: 2025
 
The small notice nailed to the side of a swim dock
pulled from the water to rest on the beach for winter
at Schoolhouse Pond in Chatham, Cape Cod.
 
Appropriate punishment, no doubt, for the offense
of my sitting on that dock for a rest during my walk
around this large kettle pond. Haven’t ever seen
 
any snappers in these parts and neither must have
the many swimmers of these waters every day
in the summer. But I can see a strict schoolmaster
 
in his tiny one-room schoolhouse on the pond
back in the days of the early settlers threatening
his children with such punishment for failing to do
 
their homework on time or for fooling around in class.
And I can see a smart-ass kid retorting that he’ll
just take the turtle home to his mother to make into
 
a delicious soup or stew, leaving the master
no recourse but to tell him he can’t go home until
he’s successfully summed the numbers 1 to 100,
 
then embarrassing him in front of the class by saying
that the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss did it
in his head during detention when he was only five.
 
 
 
The Sun God’s Sun Dog
Abstract Magazine: June 12, 2025
 
When he said its name, the more common
               one, I thought of Aten or Ra, mythology

learned long ago, but no, he said, not god,
               but dog, so I dispatched Zeus walking his,

and suppressed my overall dislike of dogs
               unleashed on the paths I walk, those signs

denying their rights the owners claim,
               but not that type of dog, he said, instead

the kind revealed to him when he and his
               mother marveled at the sky one evening,

happenstance she said, clouds found 22°
               aslant from the setting sun, a bright spot
​
in his day, rainbow colored, as if another
               sun had suddenly been born, the sundog.
 


​Down Here On Earth
Green Hills Literary Lantern: Issue XXXVI 2025
 
Mid-December, lakes and ponds frozen over
early this year, Canada geese late to
organize their voyage south, their honking
louder as more and more V-formations
unite to form a vast geometric
array overhead. Down here on earth,
we have learned how to honk at one another,
have trouble sharing a common purpose,
unable to join others from different flocks,
choosing instead to head on divergent paths,
like when a couple reaches a fork
and decides to continue their journey
apart, waking one day to see that what
bound them together got lost along the way.
 
 
​
​The Shape of Things
Third Wednesday Magazine: March 13, 2025
 
From a young age, my sister had a knack
for seeing beyond the big picture
to the shape of things that composed it.
Our father would cut out a photograph
from National Geographic, glue it to plywood,
 
use a jigsaw to fashion pieces
of a nature puzzle for her. Right-side up
they were too straightforward, so she
turned them over. Back then,
she could deal with upside down,
 
but like most of us these days, she’s unable
to puzzle out the shape of things
in the world, especially south of her border--
living in Victoria B.C. no escape
from the goings-on in Washington D.C.,
 
distress she wishes her country could place
a tariff on. Wonders what will become of her.
Can no longer make any of the old pieces fit--
as if she’d sat on a wall and had a great fall
and can’t put herself together again.
 
 
 
Hydrodynamics
Tupelo Quarterly: Issue 34, Winter 2025
 
So-called Lake Marie, more a pond on which I watch ducks
at play; it qualifies as a lake because it has both an inlet
and outlet, as does my brain these days, more outgoing than
incoming except when news flashes overwhelm, a torrent
like the last three days of rain, water nearly a foot above
the outlet drain. Whirlpools form at the left and right, migrate
toward the center, coalesce, snag dead oak leaves, and suck
them down to pass through the culvert under the road to join
the stream someone long ago named the Saw Mill River
when there was a mill with saws buzzing through logs all day,
a noise more constructive than today’s guns and bombs,
my mind caught in a vortex of wars, like drowning in a current
you can’t fight, one that pulls you under, the equations that
govern its dynamics not solvable in grad school, less so now.
 
 

Headstone. Footstone.
Third Wednesday Magazine: September 6, 2024
 
Strolling through a cemetery on Cape Cod reading
inscriptions, I thought of the graveyard I visited on the first
anniversary of my mother’s death, her ashes buried
a body’s length apart from my father’s, his marked by
a headstone, hers by a footstone, the requirement
in the military section for a serviceman and his wife,
like so much else from their generation, his work as principal
of a college valued more highly than hers as Brown Owl
for a group of young girls, decades of church work making
dressings for cancer patients and leading line-dance
classes for the elderly. That rainy day, I found my father’s
easily, but had to sweep away wet leaves to locate hers.
Unable to be at her bedside during the time of Covid,
I knelt and whispered a final thank you and goodbye.
 


 Ode To A Tour Guide
Crab Creek Review: Spring/Summer Issue 2024
 
From under your floral parasol, accented English words
erupted from Greek roots. You described how the owners
of the large house whose ruins I stood within had lived.
Now, walls partly gone, no roof, the atrium’s tiles faded
and eroding. It’s a tragedy, I said. You told me that word
comes from a half-circle amphitheater where male actors
staged six-part dramas in a language whose word for
a ritual slitting of goats’ throats on an altar is tragedy.
It’s time to change the marble head on the statue outside,
you said, because passers-by need to know who lives inside.
When someone new moves in, they leave the torso in place,
change only the head. Strange, I said, for the torso holds
the heart. We talked about my house. What do they do,
I asked, when no one moves in, but someone moves out?
 
 

Caterpillar
2River: Issue 28.3, Spring 2024

I know it’s merely physics at work, not some
artist who snuck down to the pool during the night
after the late January snowfall to create her art
on the pool’s cover, no telltale footprints
giving her away. But the brush strokes are perfect,
sweeping the middle section of the canvas clean,
curving the edges of each abdominal segment
of the giant caterpillar inching its way free.
What force of nature could so neatly clear
the lowest point of the cover instead of piling up
snow there? Surely not gravity. I can’t help but think
of the artwork as a sign that at least here, if not 
everywhere, the weather is changing, the caterpillar
about to spin a large chrysalis. Soon a butterfly.



Doctor-Speak
Arts by the People: March 1, 2024
 
It was as if my young son were strolling at water’s edge
on a cloudless day, not even noticing his own breathing.
The doctors would have said that his alveoli were
clear as the sky. Then, from some unseen singularity
in the blue, his lungs became so engorged they seemed
to contain an entire angry ocean. The doctors can only
mumble idiopathic, idiomatic I learn later for not
knowing what to say when they don’t know what to do.
I hear them speak of eosinophils, a type of white blood
cell, they say, but it sounds to me more like whitecaps
attacking the shoreline of his bronchioles, his chest
heaving, every breath become an act of will. They preach
the power and glory of cortico-steroids, but I only want
them to part the sea, let him walk clear across to land.
 


Never Quite Mastered It
(accepted as Lessons from a Shore Walk)
The Rockford Review: Winter/Spring Issue 2024
 
On a gray misty morning at high tide on the Red River,
we gathered with the guide, older folk sporting binoculars
learning about the migratory habits of shorebirds--
great and snowy egrets, willets, semipalmated sandpipers,
sanderlings, piping plovers, greater and lesser yellowlegs,
ruddy turnstones, and more, present and accounted for,
various species occupying the same space foraging at the
river’s edge or among shells and seaweed, each with legs,
necks, and beaks adapted for probing at a particular depth
of water or stratum of sand, not needing to compete with
one another for nourishment, no jockeying for position to
establish territorial rights, as if some grand designer had
figured out how to put the pieces of this biological puzzle
together, but never quite mastered it for the human race.
 

 
Writing my Obituary
Passager: Issue 46, Winter 2024

Forever correcting the details in family
members’ telling of stories, I was asked 
to write my own obituary to avoid the
trouble I might experience trying to edit
it from the grave:

Though obviously neuro-diverse, lying
somewhere on the spectrum of colorful
behavior, he accomplished much in such
a short time on earth, leaving it to those
he left behind to fill in the particulars.

Postscript: Please don’t mention the time
I was in the attic trying on period dresses
when the doorbell rang and I scrambled
downstairs to greet my son’s best friend.



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 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.



Another Lone Alpaca
(accepted as Alpacas)
Third Wednesday Magazine: April 6, 2023
 
I’ve noticed that one of them always grazes alone.
When I pause at the wall, she will approach for
a closer look, probably interested in anyone who’s
interested in her, a creature like me who walks alone,
grazes alone, often stays home rather than meet a person
I might have to talk to, as happened the other day
when the driver of a beater stopped beside me
and asked if I knew anybody in these parts who could
use part-time help. Another lone alpaca, I thought.
As far as I knew, I told him, all my neighbors still
employed the workers they’d hired years ago.
He thanked me for being kind enough to speak with him,
and drove away. I turned and walked back to the
solitary alpaca to tell her I understood her better now.



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
(accepted as She Chooses to Die in Her Bed)
Third Wednesday Magazine: July  12, 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.


​
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.


​
Particle and Wave
Poet Lore: Spring/Summer 2012

          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.
​
​

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.



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.



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.
​


Half-Finished Bridge
Southern Poetry Review: Volume 46, Issue 1, 2008
 
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.

​

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.