Tag: nature
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Plagiarism
This poem began as a meditation on how renewal can feel like duplication rather than change. Its theme is the tension between natural recurrence and human fatigue—the way life reissues itself even when we wish it wouldn’t.
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Walking My Dog Without My Glasses
Walking My Dog Without My GlassesI depend on my four-legged little boy to navigate the blurwhen I’m out walking the neighborhood without my glasses.I follow the leash—him tugging me off course,left, then sideways—nose deep in something rich and rude but insistent.Yesterday, it was a brown squirrel disappearing into leaf-shadow,a harem of dogs perfumed by musk…
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Branch Psalm
Branch PsalmBranch PsalmThe dead branch inscribes wild reminders to the wind.How many nights since it first blossomed did it revel in leaf brushing against leaves, know the fall of years,feel the rain drip away, nourishing the earth, staining this continent with its open, quiet astonishment?It felt the sapwood itch itself into new rings, lose its…
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Abundant Mangoes
This is the first time I’ve been in this mango grove, hearing the iguaca sing, since my parents left this islandIt is mid-July and I am wearing my dad’s old hat palm pava square and jaunty on my balding crownquietly stealing this fleshy passion fruit, its skin warm on my palm, eager to be sucked,…
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Rogue Brother
My brother is an angler devoted to the stream that pools around long boots, making the slow cast that gently whips and ripples the surface with a reel that knows the proper weight of the scales below.Gone are the days when he fished Crandon Pier while sitting on an overturned paint bucket with a cheap…
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A Son’s Lament
It’s been over thirty-five years since I felt your motherly touch, and I no longer try to shape a garden of sorrow. Instead, I let the new grass flame, its green distinct from the old cold fire, whose embers tighten their ring with each passing year. I find joy in the crepe myrtles unfolding into…
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After the Birds: Home
Birds know the way home,the door that has their name or how to sing it into existence, if lost.Through it they find each othereven in a burning world—they find their being. And in that last lost skythey sing it into their feet,combine it with the dirt’s prophecy.Look up in the sky, at the birds and…
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Old Elm Haiku
Its leaves fold,curl inTheir grip yields to the cold windThe elm knows their loss
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Living in Holy Terror
I thank lifeby livingby praying in stitches in the midst of evergreensaggravates- water This crippled world my every payer of me— of you
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Before and After the Forklift
Before it was lowered over the broken city grid and became my second houseit was a meadow where the grasses grew tall.I watched the top shell of earthbeing moved and hauled away,saw everything leveled to sand, except a thick, distant forest with a thin stream that bled to the city park—and did not shed a…
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I’m getting giddy as the summer fades
I’m getting giddy as the summer fadesinto yellow fall, and the sky father grants me the comfort of storing his favor on my tongue- enough to close my eyes and know that it will last for the coming snow,the clean pure white that will eventually evaporate as one in the hibernating warmth always underneath.
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The Well-Trained Palomino
Again, today,the cowboy will closehis eyes and listen to the hoovesof wild horses all around himknowing that his well-trained palomino will take him homelike a loverwho knowswhat his lust wants— knows the way to him,through the black covers of that dark room—even as the returningcreates and then destroys the greening prairie, the chambray wind.
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The Pond
The pond was a quarry first, a blast furnace to the colonies where trains ran across its field.“Iron Ore Bed” map points called it.It was left to the rain when it dried up.When his parents bought the land twenty- five years before he was born, the field was overgrown and the pond was weedy and…
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Extinction
Gray wolves howl invisible on the granite shorelinewaiting for the sea’s answer-standing tall on the headland,against a wind that allows no trees,signatures the stones with ageless storms—howling to know why this once lush placewhere endless fields of poppy intertwined with pineis now defaced with crops of suburban homes.Above, a falcon startled from its rocky perch…
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On Wonder
When I look at the sky its blueness mixes and cycles with thunder, lightning and rain.I notice, the vulture, content to feast on leftovers of once beautiful things, fly with the same majesty of the hawk.At night, I see the stars burn bright and smell the rain’s petrichor snake off the worn sides of Racoon…
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All the Common Desolation Among the Cruelest April Blooms- A Wasteland Homage and Parody
[April is the cruelest month….The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot]It’s almost April and the trees will be shedding winter’s desolation in the canopies of the late afternoon sun.The golden few, the sheer blue above know the ritual dead will be shredded byhoof, foot, beak, talon and claw.Only the poet, the one who lives apart,will mourn and…
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The Fruit
The apple trees emerge from winter sleepcascades of pink-white blooming bright starsbecoming eye memories for the kitchen child eating cherries with cream amidst the cooking spring lamb, the figs, fresh peas, mint As the trees put on their leaves, add yet another ringthe mother puts on the ghost grandmother’s coatfilled with blue-veined memories of the…
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In the Midst of the Snowy Forest
(After Major Jackson https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/major-jackson#tab-poems)The shadows of pines on the snow cast their canvas.The Downy Woodpecker stabbing beak carves wordsthat my pen cannot equal into the January morning.Her chirping is filled with a feasting frenzy resolve for the beetle larvae beneath the bark.I look, but even with my wood-boring eyes I cannot interrogate beyond the known:…
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Mothers and Daughters: A Bee in Her Bonnet
Amongst the leftovers she would sit in the old shed, with its corrugated tin roof and clapboard siding, feeling the heat come to her, a caress floating from the ground. She watched her mother delicatelyflour the last of the catfish. The shed use to be a playground but now it was a hideout- somewhere to…
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The Green Gown
The green gown rippled downin the breath and shadow of the willow branch, invisible noon and nightto all searching ships.
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A Tour of My Happy Place
I am a lousy gardener that only offends the soil on top and below. No Petunias or Marigolds bloom, only crab grass struggling with Tennessee moss, and a small patch of Kentucky Bluegrass the survivor of almost fifty years and two previous owners: a general practitioner who layered the inner sod of the…
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The Call of the Wild
What does a dog know of being a wolf, a wolf know of being a dog? The wolf howls not to understand the moon but to know itself in the community of nature, to shout out its place in the pack and among the stars. It knows hunger that a dog will…
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Wildfires: California, Paradise
Nature always wanted to burn Paradise down, a swailing to its Indian, Spanish calling, a burn-off to its mandrake roots, enflamed with its third day existence, stuck between the iteration of water and light, heaven and earth, day and night, the animal hordes, the existence before the existence of man for which it sacrificed dust…