new poem

Wishbone

Holding things down on my end

Calibration the name of the game purchase

Gained then lost yet again

Longing for your

Exquisite exertions palpable

Down length and

Breadth of this delicate glyph

Grace and menace

In equal measure

On display across the bight

Floored by your gaze

Play of three fingers

Against your maddening pinch

My feigned contortions leavened

By a finning hand

To ward off the snap

Of lesser wishes.   

Publication

The poem, “Blank” appears in the Fall 2014 issue of the Dunes Review.

http://www.michwriters.org/dunesreview/

The author will read the poem at the Dunes Review Launch event at Brilliant Books in Traverse City on Saturday, October 18^th. 

Blank

Father was a quarryman, hands at home

On a welded wheel, fingers stiff, waiting for sun

To clear the lip of the pit, an artist is his own way . . .

old reprint

How To Survive Winter

The thing about long

vigils is Systems Redundancy, an

economic phrase on loan from

civil engineering. Most but not all

observations made

through artfully hung

windows framing fixed objects

cunningly arranged.  Take two

carved pumpkins placed

just so among bare lilacs

last November.  Drinking coffee at dawn

at the kitchen table, leaning

slightly to the left,

I mark their daily progress toward

soft shell abstraction. 

With only a minor adjustment of perspective

an angle opens on a cold

shoulder of snow concealed

from the sun alongside the shed, winter

giving me the business. 

The feeders, visible from the back

room windows draw

the usual rag tag flock

making observations

of their own, shocked

by the relentless decline

on view inside.  At some point I'll pull

on my boots and plant myself

on the patio, dog

at my side, silent as we watch

shadows on the white rump

of the yard

take ever smaller

bites.