Early Fall Denial

The acorns drop early,

And this morning,

I hear birds whose

Names I can’t recall.

Their songs, their bodies

Remind me of last spring.

The seasons

Don’t pay attention,

Instead they overlap,

Blur and bend,

As if to resist nature.

They can pretend, like us,

They way we look for something,

Like the denials, or the loveless

Of how we never tried 

To love,

Engaged in acts,

This weakness,

We took turns, saying 

We must overcome, 

Saying all wrong reasons

Why love can’t survive.

Desire weakens, 

And I let him use me

And listen to his flat tongue

And how he say how he doesn’t 

Trust women. 

I cannot respond, it must be

The music in this place

You call home. 

Then there’s me,

Nervous, talkative, and wine clumsy.

I don't understand why I'm saying

What I'm saying, but, 

You're not listening, and say

I remind you

Of your daughter of seven, 

The way I can spill, but I know

This is what it's like

To be a seasonal lover, and

Learning not to blame,

Even when the swell of the moon

sweeps us into weakness,

And for that moment, I seem to fly, 

Trying not to look 

At your wings, and the way

You will hide your featherless skin.

SunDog Lit Mag Publishes Poem, "Fish Eggs."

This is an older poem, one that I started working on the first year after my stepfather, Breck passed away after a long battle of terminal cancer.

My mother was left with a lot to sort through--on all levels. I watched her chip away at the garage, his garage, trying to make sense of an entire man's live: captain of a seventy-two foot boat docked in the San Francisco Bay harbor; a scuba diver; a father--twice to different families; a grandfather; a businessman; an outdoorsman; and the list goes on.

One day, my mother came in the house and showed me a dive slate that Breck had written on. This moment in time inspired the poem. I worked on it for a few years, back in 2008, and later returned to it around 2013.

Click here to be taken to the web site where the poem is:

SunDog Lit Mag

Flying Observations

Flying Observations

1.

Sometimes I dream I’m flying through the air, pretending I’m a bird when I’m actually swimming underwater in the pool at our apartment complex in Tampa.  Fearlessly, I travel towards the deep end where there are less and less people.  I am invisible to a world of bathing beauties, who lace the outside of the pool, absorbing hours of rays onto their skin.  I touch the bottom of the pool with my hand.  I feel sand. 

2.

When I fly in my dreams, like I do in the pool, I perch on top of the long sweeping branches of the old maple trees of Michigan, weeping willows of Minnesota, and the palms of Florida; these are the trees of my past and present. I am alone in my observations.

3.

I don’t have the words yet to describe what I’m seeing. 

4.

Like in my dreams, I take big underwater strides, gracefully jumping in slow motion from treetop to treetop—disappearing into the blue before me.

She Thinks of You While Cooking

She Thinks of You While Cooking

It’s the crescent of the body,

a relief, the way to yield

across the kitchen table,

the way body becomes

vulnerable, soft indentions into wood.

With our reflexes, we become tasteless

in all our desires in the wait;

she finds you in the fragrance,

and creates a marriage—

the lemon, oil, and the pepper.

This is the nature of all fruit,

The offering, the submission of their only flowers,

an exotic display, a culinary play

narrated daily by the heavens.

The Position of My Dreams

There’s geography in my dreams,

Where ribbons recoil and poetry joins

Our discussions, bookmarked…

Like the body that remembers,

Or the navigation between us, where

I sit hundreds of miles to the north.

What We Choose to See

Your fires start with the sound of the axe splitting wood in the garage.  Only a man who’s in love with me would build me a fire.  I admire your wintered masculinity, the leather gloves you wear as you carry the bundles of split wood into the house, the focus of fire pressed deep into your eyes, the scent of cold ash that escapes from the open glass door of the wood stove, and the splinters that stick like lint to your sweatshirt.  With every fire, you kneel before the wood stove with your back to me: I see the backside of prayer.