Tag: time
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Family Tree
Family Tree began as an image of a house without windows and a river carrying away its debris. The poem explores how time erodes lineage—the way humanity sloughs into the river’s swell and becomes part of its current.
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The Birds Remember Everything
A lyrical meditation on city birds, memory, and instinct. This poem honors the quiet rituals of return, grief, and the histories we refuse to name.
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Snow Globes
Snow Globes There are tableaux we make out of dinner plates, a child’s lost sock,a father’s coat on the bannister,the silent, stuck smile of a motherstirring steam into endless errands—windows frosting into the same patterns,altars of dusty decades accumulating unnoticed in twice told stories, reupholstered sorrows,all the slow cyclones of repetition caught under glasswaiting for…
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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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When the earth is no longer a womb
When the earth is no longer a womb,just a shriek and whistle of once uttered prayer—a long, puncturing howl of everything that was once you turned into casualties of silence, then you know that death has arrived, noiselessly, silent as a missile. All the clamor outside- it’s the hibakujumoku, (the survivor trees) insisting on life…
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Gratification in time’s diminutions
Time’s diminishments adds its own beautyin gratitude for moments that are not ours:the child tiptoes into the mother’s bedroomand silently witnesses her comb her hair,later listens to her snore, transferring to them the transient lyrics of the song of life- the lines that survive the well of nights,the rose thorns to bloom in their mouthsuntil…
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Our Secret City
I wander through this secret citymapped in the words we only know,and we can only define.I am the citizen of you and you of me. Everyone we know drives bye,their cars filled with everything we ownflying out the window.The next vanishes into the mistbeyond the curb of what we once were.Or, is it, will be?Where…
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On My Father’s House
On my father’s housethree slaves and six horsesdied when the old stable blazeda century and a half ago, and three union and two confederate soldiersslayed each otherin a forgotten skirmisha few years later.Their skeletons were foundtwo years after the war under an uprooted white pine.The county let the field return to forest,except for the old…
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Another Day
I am at that age where I am relieved that it’s day again every time I awake. Instead of crushing time between my hands, I am content to let it take shape, watch the day’s soft eyes blink the hours away, help take it by the hand when the night says it’s time to go.
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Old Stagecoach
I came upon it almost hidden in the grass,leaning against bluff, amongst fallen boulders,prideful and wizened in the fading sunlight, easy to see how it once thundered plains, prairies.The boy who drove it is dead, no longerdreaming of the new town at the next stop,no longer seeing wonder in the buffalo dustingall around him, knowing…
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Time Pieces
I. 1. The poem parses time into syllables and the syllables reach out to hold you in the embrace of your grandmother’s words, the light touch of motherly praise, the squirm of a daughter’s protestations, the first gurgling phonemes of the womb advancing to meaning, dissolving to memory. 2. The grandfather clock travels in grandfather…
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Seeing 2020
I want to greet the new year with 20/20 eyes, knowing that cure dances on the edge of hope’s grave and that in this biblical year of flood, cancer and death, that grief is just a short term companion. Tomorrow time will step me away leaving only memory and the long walk to the…