Author Archives

Bill Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

• Who made the constellations

  By Bill Pearse on July 28, 2015 • ( 8 )

  The days fanned out, an ocean of stars came into view And Crow was there too, a star in each eye gave him sight — the same glow on his wings gave him flight, and though it took a million or more… Read More ›

• That was a lifetime ago in West Seattle

  By Bill Pearse on July 26, 2015 • ( 13 )

  

  The house just hugs you, Beth said about our place in West Seattle. Mike asked if they still had the speakers I left in the living room ceiling but I didn’t think to look. I parked a few spaces up,… Read More ›

• Dots on the hill

  By Bill Pearse on July 24, 2015 • ( 13 )

  

  Last Friday in the States until sometime next spring. Moon fattens to a claw. Danced the trifecta of drink starting with Tequila out of pint glasses sucked through straws, licking the sides, backcountry animal tongue. Took the morning walk to… Read More ›

• Made up dreams

  By Bill Pearse on July 23, 2015 • ( 10 )

  The plastic hummingbirds that glow at night seem a lifetime ago since I gave them to my mother-in-law and she hung them on a hook off her deck. There’s even a sense of fall in the air, that dry rattle… Read More ›

• No Christmas in Germany

  By Bill Pearse on July 21, 2015 • ( 24 )

  

  At the end of 2009 we returned from a four-month sabbatical in Germany, France, Ireland and Italy. I was eligible for another sabbatical seven years later, which would make me 46 the summer of 2017, and seemed too far away…. Read More ›

• An honest living

  By Bill Pearse on July 20, 2015 • ( 10 )

  We unroll a map of Scotland that hangs off the edges it’s so big, can’t fit on the table. Some coarse navigating between destinations, time tables, circling forests and lochs, places they make Scotch. Late October, Scotland. October leaning into… Read More ›

• Half a summertime ago

  By Bill Pearse on July 19, 2015 • ( 4 )

  I’ve taken to a big steer named Cowboy who lives over the hill from my mother-in-law’s at the Second Hand Ranch, where they take in animals who would otherwise be turned into coats or eaten. But flies gather around his… Read More ›

• Richard Brautigan is dead at 49

  By Bill Pearse on July 18, 2015 • ( 6 )

  It took about a month for them to find his body and a whole lot longer than that for him to be discovered while he was alive. And he is there at the roadside jotting down notes by a flattened… Read More ›

• Pick me out a poem

  By Bill Pearse on July 17, 2015 • ( 2 )

  After I ate the poet I left the shells piled high on a plate translucent-pink, done just right — and after all that picking out the meat, it looked like more than when I started, once it was done.

• The coin of the realm

  By Bill Pearse on July 16, 2015 • ( 9 )

  It twists and shifts with the pace of a Rube Goldberg machine, drops men from boats to dangle in the sky, forest green figurines crouching, aiming, leaping — heroes in the minds of boys, heroes in living form some call sacrifice. A plastic American… Read More ›