Category: Memory
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Bunkhouse mornings
The forest floor crackles, catching dribbles from above. A breeze shifts, fresh spray showers the twigs and dried leaves. I can smell that rain and those damp, quieting mornings, cool moss under my feet. The blue jay’s harsh, long cawk, intrusive. Why did they not swoop down on us? The breeze builds through high branches,…
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Trinity Grille, Denver
The waiter doubts me, a worn heap retreating into simplicity and slight self-abnegation. I prepare myself to fold into the priestly realm of sleep. Do I look like a stewardess tonight, drinking my white wine and sipping my French onion soup (in this bar, at this time of night, overstating the feminine)? But I am…
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Jeanie
Skies hang today like my gray-brown bed sheet from when I knew you, discolored by countless nights of filthy feet and scraped knees from spud and ding dong ditch and ghosts in the graveyard, never washing white. How long it takes to see the nonwhite on the sheet and then longer still to decide whether…
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Top of the White Trail
The first sense you have is of the isolation and how disorienting it feels to not see anyone, even a stranger.
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The poet’s house
Spare enough for frozen flower branches to scratch the icy kitchen window, rain-soaked goldenrod to brush against her dress, evenings of lost, tender fears spying down the empty lane, long, hot afternoon delays, awaiting a dry spell to take up the mowing, the mending, the swinging. Wide open, ever-joyful tedium. The birches down the pasture…
Poems from in between 