when a storm surged for days off the Mexican Coast and finally breached California shores Old Testament style and flushed our streets with epic amounts of spring clean rain. In the morning epidemiologists reported the virus was last seen in filmy rivers jumping the curbs in San Diego. Oceanographers are saying this event makes history… Continue reading Pandemic III: I Dreamed the Pandemic Was Purged
Category: My Poems
Despite the Mess of Us All
Today it isn't just the fresh marsh grass that inspires me, each blade bent and turned to glass polished by a quiet rain, or the clouds that race to stay ahead of wind's invisible paintbrush, always loath to strike a pose and every day a masterpiece. It's also the sight of a nest of webs,… Continue reading Despite the Mess of Us All
Hand, or Specimen?
Grandma, I just love your veins, touching one protruding on my left hand, watching it sully from side to side. Grandma, your hands are like specimens, my own interpretation. Veins reminiscent of invertebrates in the Natural History Museum— earthworms, centipedes, those that squirm and seek shelter. If a museum object: Left hand, mature female homo sapiens, Caucasus, sepia-colored… Continue reading Hand, or Specimen?
Before I Was Real at the DMV
Was I ever real enough to see a hummingbird hover outside my room certain that it was my mother again enough of a presence for baby lizards to leap from the sidewalk like exclamations startled by the shadow of me to gape at a fallen sycamore leaf big as Goliath’s Philistine hand with all five fingers curled in a… Continue reading Before I Was Real at the DMV
In a Ring of Redwoods Is
Patience, in peaceful protest against the meanness of time, and with the ground that cringes underneath their roots, the rumble and creak of a weary world. Patient with the roar of civilization they swallow to save us from ourselves, and once absorbed it is muffled, hushed, and then recycled as wise old growth. Patient with… Continue reading In a Ring of Redwoods Is
Requiem for Australia
And from the darkness, curled up on a chair the girl heard a gunshot from the screen. The mother deer would never more be seen and the girl's youth blew past her like cold air. She cried and gripped tight her sister's arm and gradually her stinging tears would fade, but innocence had also blown… Continue reading Requiem for Australia
On the Altar of a Vote
It began as a hole punched in a page in November, in a garage precinct after waiting in line, shifting our legs, removing our coats and our shared beliefs. The altitude changed when we walked outside as if driveway and street had become a cliff, a chasm across which we'd taken sides— or actually between… Continue reading On the Altar of a Vote
Pear Trees II: Nothing Gold Can Last
Here the leaves were left to stay in shimmers underneath the trees. In mounds of gold brighter than day their autumn simmers on its way to winter's gray finality. The poet: "Nothing gold can stay," and now I see the leaves face down. But all their stems reach up stick straight like small arms raised… Continue reading Pear Trees II: Nothing Gold Can Last
To Go Back Home
To find the road that leads back to home— if not in a dream, then maybe at dawn from a dormer window and memory as sharp as arrowheads found by a stream and crisp as our sun-dried sheets—that clean, and fragrant as acres of fresh cut lawn. To leave for home quickly, nighttime or day,… Continue reading To Go Back Home
One Hawk, Two Ways
At first it was a silhouette I saw blacken the asphalt when it slipped above our quiet street, all its claws raked across the timid morning's lips. The sky parted for his swift descent hushed as arrows—just a shudder rose of damp air displaced for death's advance, the morning peace a carcass now exposed. With… Continue reading One Hawk, Two Ways