Standing Outside the Captain Whidbey Inn
A Madrona tree, with its peeling bark
and banana-shaped leaves, leans out
over Penn Cove against a pillow of gray sky.
Around the tree’s trunk, a gnat
pumps her white wings again and again
Category / Poetry
A Way to Measure Smell
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 Clouds
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
Outside alone at night for the first time (Seattle, 1960)
The cousin has gone inside
For some reason. She is my only
Relative who is my age that
I know about and I trust her
Because she knows about grass
Ribcage
The ribcage was invented to wrap around soft organs that breathe,
To curve like elephant tusks beneath the skin,
Supported by knotted vertebrae.
The ribcage was invented to be flexible,
To bend with cartilage, to seldom break.
Losing My Eyesight
is sad
but comical.
A bench becomes
a sleeping horse,
stranger,
Continue reading… "Losing My Eyesight"LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves -September 14, 2015, 5:51am EST
1.3 billion years ago,
two black holes kissed for the first time.
Absorbed by each other,
a mass three times our sun
shot out from their bed posts.
Ripples in their fabric reached ours
in a slight blip to the walls of our lasers
Untitled
List of possible tattoos
that are metaphors
for past/passed
lovers
1. A tornado, a hillside, the sun, paused.
2. Pictures of body parts.
3. Lots of ghosts. Ghosts and …
Elegy
She is the absence of light
at the edge of the door
bruise of sky on the horizon
Heaven
For me: a train forever west, fragrance of old steel, engine smoke.
By day, the view car: wraparound glass and free chardonnay,
always west through fields of new corn,
muscled mountains, whitewater river,
occasional deer, cinnamon feathered ducklings.