Category Archives: Poetry

for Jon Hawley, the Armchair Traveler Wait. Slow down a bit. I’d like to talk.

Four years old,      and I’ve already been schooled.

after Mary Powell The matron’s eyes are dark, and hollow. Her skirt is an indistinct pleated gray, while a darted white blouse billows below the boat-necked breast and above an elasticized waist.

after the lady Skagit Sunlight floods half the road on which I travel; a shadow cast by the guardrail obscures my lane— the westbound side, which rushes past bitterbrush, bluebunch wheat grass, ponderosa, and sandstone. This Methow thirst can consume … Continue reading →

(after Francis Thompson) Imagine a night sky in the Barrens       without the North Star. Imagine that Zeus had never thrown       Callisto into the sky,

Orchards hang in the evening air, splayed along alluvial bottomland like sagging, vast, corporeal mists, ordered rows of sentient sentinels.

I come not to you with words of wisdom       but with words that unseal doors

On a dark star-filled night I step outside long after the town retires and gaze upward, dogged stillness the analogesic to my soul.

You know the feeling: waking up staring to the right where