by
I do not sing these songs
as much as mutter
over what I notice
like an itinerant priest
parsing last rites randomly
to people passing outside
nevertheless I trust what I say
matters yet to whom or how
I do not pretend to know
there is a truth to poetry
I will never understand
for it occurs without my help
I have become resigned to it
as with much of my life
things happen as they happen
(April 7, 2026)
I’ve tossed yarrow stalks on a table,
and stared blankly at arcane cards
pretending at small divinations.
Last week I’ve been reading poetry
that survived orally for millennia
before copied slowly onto a page.
I’ve done all these things before,
so much so I almost recognize
the footprint’s patterns in the sand.
Each morning repeats itself:
I let the dogs out, start coffee, piss,
as if the sun wouldn’t rise otherwise.
Yet, it does, as it will again:
so starkly beautiful, so new.
(December 15, 2025)
Today as I do most days
for the last fifty years,
I write the life
I have left to me.
Most days I have little
to say of consequence;
yet, I continue
to rattle along
with a naive trust
tomorrow will arrive
trembling with nascent rage.
(November 28, 2025)
The thing is you won’t live long
anyway
the thing is to see where you are
While you are—
—George Oppen
fool, look out the window
And write
—George Oppen
You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
― Samuel Beckett
I made the mistake of looking at an old “manuscript” from about 15 years ago. I made it about 10-12 pages in before I ran across a couple of lines that I could call good enough to be poetry. There are about 40 more pages to go. I hesitate to go on. I have always over the decades cycled up and down in my opinion of my writing. I know, every writer has doubts. But that does not make it any less depressing when I am plummeting, nor any more justifiable when I am flying high. I remember Robert Frost saying somewhere that he didn’t write experimental poetry, because experimental poem was another name for failed poem. The poem either worked or it did not. If it did, then it was not an experiment; if it failed, then it wasn’t a poem. The old manuscript was not a poem—which was depressing. Instead it was a series of posturing hoping without hope to somehow adhere from one poem/stanza/blither to another without any real attempt on my part beyond “chance” in some misguided belief that John Cage’s ghost would descend to lead me out of the wilderness of my hubris. I take solace in the belief that I knew it was crap, because I put it away and never really looked at it for the last 15 years. I somehow knew without knowing….I am smarter than I let myself be (to use a mantra I said about my students on myself).* My current plan is to plow through the fallow field, and see if there are some living roots that can be salvaged. It will be a trudge. But then, what else would I be doing.
*They are smarter than we let them be.
“all the borders of itself”
-Ranier Maria Rilke
The worm turns
into itself
to remember
the strands,
the traces,
which wove
the carapace
it will
leave behind.
I must change
my life.
(January 9, 2023)
“If I knew what I was doing, I’d be doing it right now…”
—Radney Foster
Another morning sun trickles
through the cottonwoods. Today,
I have time to write. Instead,
I watch the cardinal pair twitter
from branch to branch, fluttering
like drunken dancers in love.
I have nothing to say; yet, today
that is enough. The cottonwoods
slowly clatter in the soft breeze,
while the grey cat purrs at my feet.
(July 1, 2022)
As if she has been here for millennia
calmly chewing grass, the buffalo stands
in an open field below the mountain.
Aware of the biting fly and herself,
but little else, she still provides so much
into the life of the poorest village.
What difference can the monk’s laughter make
to her as it echoes through the valley?
(May 14, 2022)
I toss out a line
in hopes it will pull something
from the dark waters.
A small pebble sinks slowly;
my poetry plumbs myself.
(January 1, 2022)
let me say it again, and then
again softly, so only
you can hear me,
a lover late at night
whispering her desires,
until you believe it’s true
this time—
because somewhere
you can’t remember,
you heard someone,
perhaps me,
say the very thing
that you hear now
but it coheres,
this time,
to what you’ve heard,
like spiders dropping
one soft strand to another,
so I whisper again
into your ear
through the dark
tonight
(December 26, 2021)
by
the cat slept all day
turned tightly into herself
a sublime wisdom
snow begins to fall
silencing the day’s hard sleet
the night grows colder
ice brightens the moon
along the bare branches’ backs
like a hot whip’s snap
by morning the snow
drapes the yard as if with light
the chimes slowly sound
a lone mockingbird chirrups
inside the house the cat waits
(February 18, 2021)
we must wait
without fear
for the end
memory’s a mirror
distorted anew
in each reflection
rippled across a dark pond
(November 4, 2020)
by
today is today;
only, today’s different:
today, I am here.
(September 11, 2020)
from a work in progress: “process, not a journey”(73)
beneath this static
this white noise
silence flows
unnoticed
pervasive
the river’s source
as in prayer i kneel
cup my hands
and drink
(July 9, 2020)
from a work in progress, “process, not a journey”(69)
the grey cat sits
on the table by the window
and watches the mockingbird
on the elm outside
.
I watch her patience
today and yesterday
and last week
and think she’s oblivious
to sit so stoically
day after day
without hope
of any desires’
consummation
.
I lose my way each day
throughout the day
thinking of this
then distracted by that
as if the unspecified contains
some mysterious truth
more than a cat
sitting in the sun
(June 28, 2020)
I read this morning that Hemingway said that better writers didn’t talk about their writing; I think it is often important to reflect on what one is doing as one writes: metacognition to use education jabber. So, fuck off Ernie.
I started a serial poem back at the beginning of January. The plan was to write 140 poems, each poem’s length is pre-determined by a random number generator, ranging from 3-140 syllables. It was to follow vaguely the rules of a renga, where each poem grew out of the one before it somehow, weather through theme, pun, image, or a reply. The number of poems was determined by the number of syllables in a sonnet.
I have come to the end of the first “stanza” section—40 poems. The last poem in the section #40, ‘rhymes’ with (39), (20), and (1); as (10) and (30) ‘rhyme—in an attempt to create an overall section unity. I will now begin to move forward with the second ‘stanza’ while collecting and tightening section 1, in hopes that as I reread and work over section 1, the themes and ideas that emerged in section one will echo and grow organically in section two: a conversation between sections one and two, if you will, as section two talks to itself.
Well, it keeps me something to do, and think about if nothing else.
(March 22, 2020)
subtext 