If I hold the truth in my hand,
dare I eat it like the eucharist
placed on the tongue of a simple sinner,
or savor it like a mouthful of bourbon
before it burns the words wholly?
(August 7, 2026)
Category: ways of knowing
-
I’ve resigned myself
that there are no answers
that what we haveis only here now
waiting for yearsto be seen
like an old man’s breathon an icy november day
(August 5, 2026)
-
I wander up Bread Loaf mountain
The day before my Chaucer final
With my professor’s wife, an Anglican
Priest, and their 7 year old son, Luke.
I am not a hiker, but I need to think
About something other than Chaucer
So when she asked us all to go along
I thankfully said yes. No one else did.
I am not a hiker. I am an introvert.
I plod along, thinking, not talking.
Luke asks question after question.
His mom answers each patiently.
She says I’m quite taciturn.
I don’t know its meaning
So I say nothing and continue
Trudging up the mountain.
Luke asks me how I keep going.
I say I think of something else.
She asks what I’m thinking about.
Boethius, I say and take another step.
I need to read it again before tomorrow.It is short enough to be read overnight,
Unlike anything we read for class-
Which was all of Chaucer’s works.
She offers me a bottle of water;I naively did not bring my own.
I am not a hiker. I have a headache,
But nothing like Boethius.
We make it to the top, somehow.The view is stunning and vast.
After eating a sandwich, Luke
Runs about, eager to start down.
The next day, I write for three hours,Comparing parts of Boethius
To corresponding sections
Of Troilus and Cressida.
Stunned I finish, somehowWith nothing left to say:
I am not a hiker. I know
What taciturn means now.
I took a chance on BoethiusAnd found consolation.
I am not a hiker—
So ends my tale.
(August 2, 2026)
-
details, like mosaics, decades old
around eleven, the adrenaline slowfall from my red Christmas bike,
ripping skin on loose gravel,
catching the pain across my palms
facts of a sortfollowed by conjecture
the sky was winter grey—I was heading home (from where)
hurriedly (was I late, for what
or just the thrill of speed
or both— fear and joy dancing
together like flames)
perhaps, perhaps
what-ifs’ multitudes unravelwith time and causal doubts
as perhaps twist and spin into now’s
singular, tight, and irretrievable knot
I tell myself I know and knewthe bits of broken glass cohere
but I don’t anymore than I did
I fell, I bled, I musthave made it home
for I am here
(July 20, 2026)
-
Your hands dance the air
as you sit across the table
describing an event we shared
decades ago in our youth.
We are both there as before;a sequence of events similar
enough to be the same events;
yet, causality and context shift.
Like Wittgenstein, it dawnson me slowly that the story
you are telling is not the one
I have told about love’s loss.
You ask why I’m crying;I realize you never knew.
(July 15, 2026)
-
What can I do
with conjugations
of being— beyond
a fool’s confession?
I’ve been here before.Hours hurry past the window
like soft grey mice
skittering between shadows.
The sun slowly approachesthe eastern horizon
as if a mendicant
with an empty bowl.
My impatience vaultsover the obvious words;
I have difficulties
reading as a result.
I crib lines from bookslifting them out of context,
then go down paths
that refuse to exist.
-
As I lacked the keys
and unspoken passwords
manners and intrinsic tropes provided
to those born oblivious within their walls,
I have never understood
how life works—
There was always
too much
that would not find its pattern,
too much
that had been broken and scattered
like ancient mosaics,
once Roman floors,
no longer conformed
to forgotten wars.
I was rarely satisfied
with what I knew,
as if the next glance,
the next book,
the next conversation—
might reveal it all.
For decades now,
I’ve stood outside
with one ear pressed
against a door
listening
for the right key
to slip the lock ;
for the hidden tumblers
to fall;
for the right door
to admit us all.
(June 14, 2026)
-
The night is broken in a multitude
of awakenings. The dogs are disturbed
by the full moon’s motion across the sky.
Between their futile barks, I lie awake.
As dawn approaches you pull me closer,
laying your head upon my chest. I sleep,
finally drifting to the edge of dreams
where the world is neither vast nor empty.
Lately I have been thinking about death.Not my own, nor anyone’s I know, but
Death— the absurdly inevitable
avalanche collapsing beneath our feet:
as if I can know more than what I am;
as if I am something other than dust.
(May 31, 2026)
-
He stopped forgetting,
and began again to see
the shadows in the trees.
No longer willingto hide in oblivion’s
darker eddies,
his questions turnedto soft acceptance,
and he felt free.
Memory shiftedand reshaped itself
to a looser fit,
more comfortableto the details
he wished to deny.
(April 30, 2026)
-
The snow, the road,
the woods, the town,
the wild geese, the sleepy cat
are not the snow, the
road, the woods, the
town, the wild geese, the
sleepy cat; the words I use
are not what I am saying.
Like lovers’ conversationslate at night after many years
and a second bottle of wine
are never about what they say:
a metaphor is what is left;
a metaphor is what you fear.
(April 22, 2026)
-
Process
by
I do not sing these songs
as much as mutter
over what I notice
like an itinerant priestparsing last rites randomly
to people passing outside
nevertheless I trust what I saymatters yet to whom or how
I do not pretend to know
there is a truth to poetryI will never understand
for it occurs without my help
I have become resigned to itas with much of my life
things happen as they happen
(April 7, 2026)
-
I wrote this a couple of years ago…
“to combat the resistances of language you must keep talking”–Anne Carson
I write most everyday. Since the end of last August, I have filled up two 150-page notebooks, completed close to 80 short poems. I have written, if not so obsessively as now, since I was 15. I write poetry, with the occasional venture into essays like this one. I have trouble with narrative, one event leading into another befuddles me, as does conversation between people. So I do not write fiction. Yet, I do have an interior running commentary on the narrative I am living, snipes and admonitions on my life as it unfolds. To push back against this cruel eviscerating voice, which adheres tightly within my skin, I write. I write to explain the world to myself, to explain myself to myself, to resist the world, which is lain upon me by the world. I write to resist the temptation to settle into myself without a thought. I am uncomfortable in most social situations. It’s discomforting when others try to define me, or attempt to interpret me from my writing. Yes, I am aware that all writer’s expose their minds in their writing. Even writers of fiction expose themselves through their fictional characters. Nietzsche wrote that in the end we only experience ourselves. Yet, I believe there is also a separation from oneself, a leap into the universal other, which occurs when one writes: a transubstantiation of individuality into a larger third person narrator, who watches and observes with more objective, more just, eye. Of course, I also know this is pure bullshit. I am as clotted with my biases and situation as anyone. But it is through writing, through the transformative nature of writing, where a third space can open, and one can enter along with whomever can follow into a changed world, a different, perhaps better place, if only for the time it takes to read the poem. And to keep from being defined, trapped even in these new spaces, I continue to write, to find a way to exist with myself.
(February 28, 2017)
-
I’m bored
as I write
this poem—
Not too much here
that is not mine
to ruminate:
the mistakes,
and broken desires
left behind
in memory
clot the way
with the pretense
of fate. Only fate
is just the past:
I’m here reading
what I write,
because I’m here,
not somewhere else
reading something
else I wrote today.
Somedays are destined
to be something else
which could have
happened somehow
on a warm afternoon
after a yawn or two,
but then didn’t.
(April 2, 2026)
-
Poem
by
A rose requires
no one to notice
it bloom; come spring,
it just blooms.
(March 27, 2026)
-
Sancho Panza
by
Nine books lie
on my bedside
table, unread:
six poetry,
two non-fiction,
and Don Quixote.
I should finish
Cervantes—
or at leaststart— once
again, now
that I’m older,
and his windmills
have turned to giants.
(March 24, 2026)
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