This crop of rain is all that’s touched me this fall. That’s Oregon: soggy envelope of Pacific days stretched over the Cascades’ toothy distance. But what’s distance to a raindrop? I’ve met so many schizophrenics working in this hospital the sound of rain may as well precipitate the voices, the noises that visit the distances … Continue reading →

Sawtooth of crags, raptor nests, and shattered kayaks of ghosts. Down by the freckled young river, born             while someone else is plumbing depths of silt. I angle a cow skull on my porch so it can watch             the grass unfurl without end. Through its sightless sockets, my eyes angled to be replaced by … Continue reading →

Dear afternoon visitor, slipping into the backyard of my mind, have a look-see the sleek, silver fish leaping into my luminous ethernet.  A shower curtain’s eyelid, a cosmic veil. Here’s a sharpened paradigm. Or here’s the shape of grace: play dough pressed into the fist of my 2-year-old son standing on a chair at the … Continue reading →

to the tune of the guttural rumblings of “Skynrd’s Innyrds,” fists craving communion with jaw, neck, mouths broke in slurred epitaphs of human decency. And then there was you: indecipherably dancing amidst the cacophony of spit and beer, light years away from the fray but maybe feasting on all of it, creature of the wheel … Continue reading →

The Lark I lit to show a girl I wasn’t the boy she’d known, but the tanned, bearded, work-worn man she wanted to light her Larks forever. __________ The Camels & Lucky Strikes & Chesterfields & Old Golds everyone in black-&-white movies leans back with half-shut eyes to draw on, especially Gregory Peck in Pork … Continue reading →

Then, it was easy to believe the gentle world to be sad.  While rereading for class, feeling the old and scribbling a few new remarks in the margins of thick anthologies, heavy as brick —(denying Pope his idiotic confidence in the dumb licking of a gamboling lamb; seconding Ivan Ilyich in all his too-late second-guessings, … Continue reading →

“Oh, man, that flip-phone’s toast!” coughs the sales dude at the iStore in the outlet mall before muscling me into an upgrade G. Bell himself would’ve called bullshit on.  With a switchblade on a bracelet he slits the copper wrapper of a smartphone that will render me dumb again—my thimbleful of techno- info a nemesis … Continue reading →

This precise hue of orange, that I imagined to be an odd angle of light, refracted from a lost dwarf planet, somewhere, is nowhere to be found, here, where my cat’s bones wrapped in a towel under the grassless drape of the black walnut tree, summered clean sunken among the detritus of last year’s living, … Continue reading →