Other Published Poetry

From Chapbook, Useless Lodestone and Other Poems
The Lune, Vol. II, No. I - Winter 2017, pp. 57-101

Bog Oak

The bole of it hummocked in the turf,
The knuckles of it deep like a tangled hand
Mummified, clasping the quag.
And the burl of it drowned there
Soaked to a fare-thee-well
Impervious, hard as a cherry stone.
Death’s implacable fixedness
In the cold bog entombed.
Rock root to the world.

No Apparent Motive

She brought me a tired silly bouquet
Of tangled drowsy flowers,
Smiling wide
Like sun on a river,
Held tight in her happy hand.
Laughing, in the morning,
Like it was natural,
Just had to be done,
Kindly, without pretense,
With no apparent motive.

Undercut Banks

Beside the rivering waters of, hither and thithering waters of, night. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Through the rain drunk meadow
Fat on mountain showers and drowsy
I stitch, in my scissor step, through the long grass
A furrow like a tipsy ploughman
And harvest before my boots
A skittering wake of hoppers blustery
Down to the rocky banks
Under cottonwood shade.

Trout wand in my hand,
A silly baton, slicing the air.
And like a conductor browbeating the woodwinds
I conjure the slipstream.

I come to track this raveling course
And to track the course in me;
To watch the stalking sun crest the canyon wall
And paint the water pewter shimmery.

To wonder too
At the dizzy stones
And mayflies
Clouding the wild roses.

To feel my boy’s old heart thump, still,
When the water piles up
On the sudden shoulders
Of the heavy trout.

To smell the consequence
Of my slippery steps
On the wet and awkward rocks
That bruise the mint and mugwort.

To see silver dimes clinging
To the water-jostled cress -
Glinting coins in the watery sun
That spend well still indeed.

And too there, once,
Gold-spurred columbines
Elegant as shooting stars
On stems impossibly delicate.

To listen to the fluent
Gravel-throated chortling
Of water on rocks
And the dark sluicing soughing
Of wind in the sedge -
Old languages I remember well
Wandering wild within willow banks.

To feel the cold on my wet pilgrim feet,
The chill on my late autumn cheeks
In the weird arctic half-light
As dusk draws down the glen on me
And the stars a sudden swath of sublime.

And to again remember, surely,
That never will I know
The deep watery secrets
In the currents of time
Unplumbed in dark undercut banks.

Useless Lodestone

Lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae non eam comprehenderunt. The Gospel of St. John

The wind has put to rout
The broken clouds
That scud along at treetops
And sweep the tawny grasses
With brooms of racing shade.
And in between each gloomy pass
The woods erupt inside
And incandesce, if such can be,
Like fireworks.

A thousand candles, suddenly,
Through the jostled curtains
And the dramatis personae, unawares,
In their pretty secret paint,
Flicker queerly before my eyes,|
All of them now brand new.

And I feel again those rolling waves
That roiled the psychedelic sea
And staggered the boat
Of my electric mind,
In my blooded season,
And weighed my anchor for uncharted waters
While feebly I compassed with my useless lodestone.

It is just light and wind and shade
That is all, I say . . .
Merely the stuff the world is made on . . .
But how again they do unhinge me.
And pluck the high harmonics
Of my sprung senses
Like the painted high horses once did
On that candy colored carousel.