Poetry, biography, and children's book author
Year after year I return to sit by this old stream bed framed in sycamore trees and watch as they slowly release their leaves to begin the long and silent good-byes— my elders, the tribe of the sycamore tree— they watched over us throughout our childhood as sentinels, when they patiently stood in our yard… Continue reading This Mute Moment in Time
For a long time it was mostly my tail that you tried to read. It does give me away—the feeling comes like a shiver and sometimes winds my tail up sloppy like a drunk. But now after nine years you also understand when you have sad eyes and I can taste ocean on your… Continue reading A Dog, Understanding
A web shivers in the air tethered to a thread between my Adirondack chairs, a spider at its head. The spider hovers silent there— assassin in the shade— until the time I need a chair and ruin what it's made. We never know what may come to claim our foundations: a hurricane of… Continue reading The Upper Hand
Some people might describe this yard as plain: the locust trees and rosemary, all green mother ferns and privet shrubs that grow around the stump where children played; some gnomes my son gifted to me, he thought a joke--- like volunteer plants that want to poke through disappearing paths---(though most I wanted.) There used to… Continue reading Disappearing Paths
He tosses another stone at the waves. I don't see it fall---only the back of his neck, so small and birdlike it makes me inhale deep---in that moment I'm struck by the dusting of sand on his left ear, the slightest glimmer of late summer sweat, the little boy shoulders---strangers to fear--- and downy skin… Continue reading The Back of a Young Boy’s Neck
The garden was leviathan no doubt when seen through your baby lizard eyes, with leaves the length of galleons afloat in the jacuzzi, a sea by its size. You chose to take sudden soundless flight into the humid draw of depths too deep, all one-plus inches of you, in breathless night and silent as a… Continue reading To a Tiny Miracle, Found
Please don’t mourn or pity my brief hold on this earth, like something frail or fine. When I’m buried, say this life of mine was more than striking glass and falling gold. My home was at the edges of the sky where time was as carefree as a breeze. And I became the envy… Continue reading Wings into Glass: The Yellow Warbler, Part II
The past has all blown east. The Monterey cypress felt it leave in the teeth of a Pacific sea squall. Ever since, the cypress has leaned east toward the past with outstretched arms. Somedays I am that cypress. Wind buffeted, whale boned, sway backed and salt bleached. I was thrust off-center in my cambium, and… Continue reading Leaning East
When the need came for me to fly I pictured a juvenile red-tailed hawk, her gray feathers fingering rising air, playing the nocturne of her flight. Soon afterward contractions began; I severed the cord that held me since birth and breast stroked through the sea heavy air. See me? I'm flying! I shout to a nest of vipers,… Continue reading Midnight Transformation
Deep beneath the sea, in a bed of sand, a tiny pufferfish flaps tail and fins and labors over cryptic hills and bands and valleys, and with burrowing begins his DaVinci: Perfect geometry of circle and furrow, radial lines all adorned with shells, in symmetry as if the Master's hand guides his design. With luck… Continue reading To Radiate, Even Briefly