Poetry
Fatherhood, Beginnings
Sometimes when I’ve been sitting in a different room for a while I forget I have a child. Then I wander into the humidified air, feel the softness of the blue rug between my toes and place my hand upon his rising chest. What will I tell my son when he asks if I am …
On a Day That Bombs
On a day that bombs were being dropped by drone aircraft in several regions of Libya, blowing apart fragile bodies, many of whom were living their sincere and momentary lives, it was a perfect day here except for the wind and the flies. The flies were too large to ignore. It was 73 degrees. The …
The Wittenberg Backdoor Bar
For my seventieth birthday my daughter transforms our living room into a bar— black sheets over windows, candles on small tables, the family gathered. She has provided a karaoke player to fulfill my old dream to sing love songs into a microphone. I’ve entered through the back to croon “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” while …
Our Lady of the Midnight Kitchen
Beans float like baby Jesuses in the soup. I get a call from a lost one-eyed cousin: he says the world is big enough in one place. I was sleeping in a cold room when the sun came up. My eyes were open, my mouth bloody, full of cat-claws and nettles. Always my life unravels …
The Girl with No Nightmares
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. —Sir Ken Robinson So the girl they’ve been protecting, the one they’ve kept at the clean brick house on the hill surrounded by the scenic pine trees to the west, the pristine green fields with no power …
Orpheus in the Harbor
There’s nothing here that you’d absolutely have to have seen: I don’t like it here for the monuments: but because of the hours where you’re deeper in Venice than even on the Rialto: On the hostel’s hill, your ear sharpened to the tune of stars ringing over the harbor— even if too far off, so …
Losing Track
Sometimes there are people who forget or neglect us, who mysteriously you never see in a cafe even though you live in the same small city. This is not a problem until you stumble upon an obituary or short newspaper article and such a delicate suffering blooms that you are forced to accept never …
Digging a Well
By hand, with a blunted pickax, a plastic bucket, and a sledge— a spade’s no good in stony ground. Six feet, and still no water. Moses struck the rock and bliss gushed out, not blood from blisters, not curses from a cracked tongue. Each strike I make makes more rock. Tell my wife the kids …
The Boathouse
We turned back from the bay while light still hesitated. You said, “Can’t see how you lived here all this time, and never fished, or swam, or sailed,” but I found the poison-ivied path down to the old stone boathouse with its rotten roof. Watery light shimmered inside the arches boats once glided through. Among …