My Love Commutes
Mornings when you have gone to work, my love, I fall into your dreams: rumble on your bus, feel the weight of your bag, nod my tired, stubbled cheek against a window. To bus hum, I snore softly, wire glasses slipping down my nose. When bus stops, I stretch strong arms, move slowly in heavy dress shoes down the aisle. And as you yawn more fully awake, I slip back into my own dreams. Still loving you, from here.
Read MoreDifficult, Tennessee
In memory of Tom Logue One day Tom and Ethel dropped their baby Louise by Ethel’s brother’s while driving through Tennessee. Making their way back to I-40, Pastor Tom saw a road sign for two nearby towns: Difficult 2 Defeated 4 Being a Baptist, he knew without ever visiting that somewhere there was bound to be a Difficult Baptist Church, a Defeated Baptist Church. He’d seen both, and being young, smart, and in love with all things ironic, he smiled and drove on. That was before muscular dystrophy claimed his oldest son Tommy at 18, before schizophrenia came to...
Read MoreZoom_3
photo by R.S. Carlson Coxa. Trochanter. Femur. Tibia. Tarsus… and four of the five named segments of mantis foreleg flare spines to pierce and grip whatever crawls, flies or falls too near. The foreleg segments hang – at rest – half-reminiscent of a monk at prayer, awkward exoskeletal sacramentals, broad and thick; they hang from what, for me, would be shoulders and, scissor-jointed twice, taper to what seem frail twigs dangling astray but, to hummingbird, beetle or honeybee too near, the tarsi prove stilettos swifter than eyes, single or compound, commonly track, and their small spurs...
Read MoreThe Spring in Michigan
From a stupor we unroll. April breaks her book open and the conte begins again. Our hero, flute-footed, arrives drunk from the party at Poussin’s; he says he’s forgotten the particulars but Pan was dancing with the lovely Bare. The great god was hoofing it with nakedness herself. In a phrase: Intent. His cloven limbs boreal and blunt against the Alchemical dew of spring. Cold unlimbering. The deer running between Cedar and lake. Easing and delicate, their obdurate hidings in sinew, shadow, and speed. They grip, with me, the sensual earth of abandoned celebrations. That’s a long way...
Read MoreGeese at Midnight
as if honking the light back thru the pine’s lashes like women floating barefoot into fields starved for some moon, their white wings on blue wood, a rustle in wetness. This was not a dream thought it held me as close, a brightness coming back as sound
Read More