Author Archives
Bill Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
-
Meet me at the cemetry gates
We dropped the kids off for their first day of German school, their first class French — French taught in German — and I walked to the cemetery by the Realschule, where we’ve started our third week of German classes,… Read More ›
-
How to love, with fences
There are limits to my love as with fences to remind us what’s ours and keep things out, keep things in — Love is a word we use for protection, like all things defined there’s a start, an end, and… Read More ›
-
Leaves clawing the cobblestones
When the French arrive, it’s with armsful of things from France: breads wrapped in brown paper bags, coolers full of cheese, boxes of wine, even duvets for their beds. It feels like a hotel and we lose track of how… Read More ›
-
First poem for fall
That first fall something found me there, the greys and browns of northwest Pennsylvania, what little light you find come November, the last of the leaves flapping just a few here and there, and yet … Read More ›
-
Hit by a Cadillac
The fourth night with the Boogie Woogie band at the wine festival here in Germany and it doesn’t sound as loud as it did the first three nights, our ears have gotten used to it. And as we resurface now… Read More ›
-
I love my liver when I eat my lover
Drinking beer in the morning in the kitchen cooking with a wife-beater and Tom Waits, finally found something the cat will eat that’s not decapitated, some calf’s liver in a yogurt sauce from a plastic packet mom adds olive oil… Read More ›
-
The Highly Capable Program Nomination Ends Tomorrow
When I was in school, they called it Gifted. After Gifted came Honours, and after that, was everyone else. Heike’s son Sascha speaks perfect English, with a delicate English accent (he’s 11) and explains how it works here in Germany:… Read More ›
-
Pigs in zen
We thought something was burning in the house, but it was just the Backhaus up the road, where the women gather to bake bread and gossip in the fall and burn clippings from the grape vines. We journeyed to Stuttgart… Read More ›
-
Hearts wrapped in cloth
It sounds like a joke, two Turks and a Kurd in our German class replaced by two Croatian construction workers and an Afghan refugee, but it’s no joke really when we go around the class and say where we’re from,… Read More ›
-
A ribbon of darkness all the way
There are prehistoric smells in my mom’s laundry area where the drain water from the washer sometimes gathers and the floor’s a stark grey stone material, a peat bog of sphagnum moss collapsing in on itself, which makes a fine… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 