Category: Poem sampler
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Visitation
Even the spires of milkweed bend over in the low tumble of wind through the prairie, dry reeds tapping hollow on ancient gravestones. When I left you here, the ground was frozen and wet, with pelting sleet leaving a pebbled sheet on the grass, the canopy, the cars. How different it feels in August now,…
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On counting cairns
Tomorrow my son moves back in bringing inexhaustible items in large clear sacks that swallow the floor like jellyfish claiming the soft sand along surf. My younger son’s things, and his girlfriend’s, are piled up in the corner. Constant piling, constant shuffling, constant marking the month, then the term, with a new pile, papers to…
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Love like a river
Even the meek swell with water running down. Come now, spill yourself into our long water. Let it trail you down over gullies, under arched branches in its passive rush. Feel the undercurrent, what draws the flow beyond eyes, buoying each awkward twig, tripping up glossy stones. How I long to know it by heart…
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March 2017
Slowly, slowly life comes back. Hair-fine roots far below the surface muster a wiggle, a stretch, and stir for us the unseen process of life beginning again. But not every capillary wiggles and stretches. Some just as mysteriously have clogged themselves up (been clogged up?) and no longer bring life back, no longer are alive…
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Even so
Even as you sit smoking weed in the room I just cleaned and leave your papers and dirty dishes on the desk, not making the bed I just resheeted, there is no amount of missing you that is enough. It goes on and on like the Mississippi flows in constant cycles from mountain top through…
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I think of love
I think of love as something that grows form as it ages, sometimes firm, sometimes round, broadening, ambling if allowed. I think of love as an elemental discovery, unwrapping itself time and again, ever revealing eccentricities, hope, a whipped dog who greets the morning with joy. Yes, even then. I think of love as the…
Poems from in between 