You wowed us with the horse’s neigh you taught
yourself to imitate so well that neighbors
thought we kept one in our house.
On the wall, as I remember it, a painting of a charcoal
colored horse on a pink background, a treasure
In half-shade that signifies the close
of night I see the faded quarter- moon
poised mute above the faint skyline.
A silence of birds sits in winter pine.
The stillness of the dawn is tangible.
I sense her at a distance with no color yet,
It feels like the world is coming to an end
you muse as we walk. Some twang guitar drifts
near the party we just left. You’re calm. A smile
tries itself on your lips almost convinced to land
despite such a mood. The sun is dropping its beautiful hammer
“I’ll finally get to see Marilyn” were your final
perfect words. The last of the rose petals
faded decades ago, but your torch was so primal,
never flickered. What’s it take, then? What kind of metal
turns the dregs of life into a love like that?
Three months gone in the wedding season
and I’d mostly been sticky. I went swimming
in the Snake River in Idaho. Got in it in Oregon
and kept still. The current pushed me back to Idaho. So
I did it again. It was good to be a strange head floating
It’s still mosquito summer in the High Sierra
when we push up above 10,000 feet,
only Annie and me and a dryad
we come across tied forever to her foxtail pine.
She’s been sitting up here
Continue reading… "Up Near Alta Peak, January 20, 2017"If I encounter knife-edged voices
I will remember cool water running
in a strong stream
I will let the water be my voice.
If I encounter cold indifference
Continue reading… "On Trump’s Election"Mounds of black scat on the trail.
Rotted hemlock clawed and scattered.
A branch snaps. Forest silence shattered
by rocks knocked loose cliff-side, hail
of scree. Even birds and blackflies freeze
My father smelled of computer paper,
shirt-collar anger when he came home.
He climbed the stairs and I thought he would turn to leave,
but he only put his coat and hat away into the closet.
In the murmur of midday heat, sky
scratched by splinter clouds, an hour
thin with drowse and daze,
when all might relinquish to the languid,
the boy pushes his blue SWAT truck against
the rocks, pulls stones and throws them
