Memory is all that we are,
and all that we are is what
we remember. These days
I often forget why I enter
a room as I enter. I’m forced
to wait on the blurred past
with its dead possibilities
to catch up to my present.
We sit comfortably couched
about the room. We confess
our stories again, shifting
scenes to allow for shapes
which differ, to be polite,
from others in other rooms.
(December 28, 2025)
My father’s ghost has returned
to haunt me after decades
of silence. I only knew
his decline; now, I’m learning
my own, a slow remembrance.
I’m no Hamlet; to avenge
his death, I would kill myself,
there would not be a question.
Telling that story once more,
I am what remains of him.
At night looking for water,
not as broken as he was,
I see him in the mirror,
frowning at me from the side.
My body reflects his own.
My mom used him as a threat
even after he was gone:
If you could be half the man
he was…if he could see you…
what do you think he would say?
She has been gone for years now,
while he hangs on the edges
darkly brooding as in life,
a storm always eminent,
on the verge of violence.
I saw my future at eight,
and a clearer past today:
his presence was an absence
always nearby, yet distant
like a shadow on water.
(November 16, 2025)
This is how this story goes, or at least what I can remember from how Dad told it. I have probably told this story as many, if not more, times than my dad. Uncle Les had gone off to college in the late 1800’s. Every now and then a letter from him would arrive that first semester, and then they didn’t. My Grandfather Noel, Les’ brother, saddled up his horse and rode off to check on things. When he arrived, Les’ dorm room appeared as if Les had just walked out and would return any minute. He had been missing for several months. Then years later, around 1906, when my dad was three years old, a man came riding up to the “dirt” farm Noel struggled to eek a living from out near Liberty Hill. The man had two large saddle bags draped over his horse, two bandoliers criss-crossing his chest, and two large pistols hanging from his hips. The man was Uncle Les. After he dismounted, he walked into the house and hung his pistols from a peg on the wall. Les never touched those guns again. “Leave those guns alone, Ralph They’re nothing but trouble,” my Grandmother Pearl told the excited three year old. Les took his saddle bags out to the barn where he slept for the next 7 years as he worked for his brother on the farm for room and board. After seven years, Les took the almost forgotten saddle bags and bought a ranch out west. Even as children, we saw the holes in Dad’s story: Where did Les get the money for his ranch? Noel only paid him with food and a place to sleep. Where had Les been all those years after disappearing from his college? What had he been doing? After being gone for so long, why did he wait for seven years before he bought his ranch? What was in those two saddle bags? Was any of what Dad said over the years about Les true in any way? How much have I filled in the holes of my memory with conjecture?
(September 7, 2025)
Memory, perpetually cloaked
in iridescent shadow, finds
itself a metaphor, becoming
along the way something
other, something momentarily
more accurate, than it ever was—
something easier, somehow,
in this moment,
to see
what was there once before,
to see
what was there all along.
As if instead of a tsunami
calmly obliterating the past
like a Japanese fishing village
washed clean from the shore
in a spasm of forgetfulness,
amnesia lifted thin silk veils
to reveal new aspects of time
no longer smothered beneath
the scent of stale mothballs
and the thick quilted layers
of familial consensus.
(August 18, 2025)
“… craft of culture,
How we go on.”
—Gary Synder
a grandson, eight, who dislikes
my puns and play with words,
intentionally made a spontaneous pun,
smiled mischievously, then ran on
laughing into his future
(April 23, 3025)
At which closed door
does it no longer matter
if it remains a closed door?
Does a story I’ve never heard,
because never told, become
more than my own
through implied genetic hints
and stale romantic longings?
Hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of years, and miles of oceans between
allow one to co-opt, create, and project
a nameless European hero (with a face like mine?)
to pillage and fuck their way into a future
through the tangled heath and ruins of time.
(April 3, 2025)
I let the dogs out to play
as someone knocks on the door.
The dogs run to protect me.
Our grown children have arrived,
unannounced with warm pastries
stacked neatly in a white box.
They came over just to talk,
and hang out. I make coffee;
they say they have some concerns.
The children tell me what’s wrong
with my life. They have a fresh
vision with a narrow view.
What can I do? They know more
than they did, but not enough
of the daily rituals
which have coalesced overtime;
the compromises, and fears
one negotiates for love.
I’ve been there. My mom was old.
I had a grasp on my life,
I thought. I wanted to help.
My tired hubris, like theirs, waits
for the cold ironic turn,
when we’ll both know it’s too late.
For now, it’s much too early.
I pour a cup of coffee,
and watch the dogs play outside.
They yip and nip through the weeds,
tumbling in the back yard,
obliviously happy.
(March 12, 2024)
“One must cultivate one’s own garden.”
—Voltaire
Scootching along on my butt
as I weed the large bed out back,
I hear my mom, dead now
these past fifteen years,
as she sat near her flower beds
pulling weeds. She complained
how she wasn’t as young as she
was anymore. I laugh to myself,
because neither am I anymore
as I pull my weeds forty years later.
(April 16, 2022)
Anger rose like a bear
growing to its full height,
growling into the trees,
massive arms outspread.
It has been years
since I manifested him;
my meds, like dogs,
keeping him at bay.
Yet, a small thing,
no more than a stone,
easily ignored—
was enough:
he flowed through me,
the adrenaline surged;
my face flushed;
my jaw clinched.
Anger swirled around me,
like a vibration of bees
migrating slowly
across an open field.
I watched it unfold
through me, as easily
as when a child
I watched him shift
from himself into fear.
But I could not run
from myself as easily
as from him. So, I let it
pass. I stood still listening
to silence, and it dissipated
like waves on a beach
chased along by sand pipers.
(April 8, 2022)
A few days past the winter solstice in the seemingly never ending worldwide pandemic, I am cleaning my house. In between running the vacuum across the rugs, and straightening the cluttered chaos of our everyday lives, I have been making tortilla soup, a tradition for the last ten or more years. Tonight, like last year, there will be no friends and extended relatives laughing over food and wine as we talk about politics, literature, art, and the lives of our kids. Tonight, only our grown children, their partners, and our two grandsons will arrive to celebrate Christmas, a religion I don’t believe anymore than the pagan symbols the Christians co-opted as a sign of hope for a better world to come: a hope, during the longest night of the year, that the sun will return again. I try not to fear for the future: the never-before-considered collapse of the U. S. as well as the fear caused by millions of people dying worldwide from this horrible virus. Instead I hope, a constant prayer, that we can overcome our pettiness and hate long enough to step from this darkness, and find enough joy in our lives, in our children, in each other, to pass back into the light. So, I clean my house and make tortilla soup, in hope that I will do so again. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
These are my mother’s hands:
wracked with worry, the veins
thick below the skin, soft
like worms in loam.
These are my mother’s hands:
holding my face, stunned
that I am still alive
to walk through another day.
These are my mother’s hands:
kneading the bread dough
for another Thanksgiving,
one more meal together.
These are my mother’s hands,
empty like bones in the ground.
(November 28, 2021)
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