Then one day it just ends. The inexplicable way things begin and end. Like some pain in a joint or a job or the last of that awful, single-ply toilet paper roll you bought thinking it was the normal kind…. Read More ›
Poetry
Rorschach
Up again before the timed lights came on. And then they were on. The cold that has you coiled in on yourself yearning for warmth. First thoughts of the day, mirror image of the last: how the coffee tumbler was… Read More ›
One chance
A bit of a brute, he was often found in the kitchen with his shirt off cooking, peeing in the garden beds or brooding by himself in the early morning dark. Sometimes he smelled. He was a hard man, but… Read More ›
Song for the dawn
I loved the look of the dawn in the mountains when camping, a long band of pale light along the horizon pushing up against the dark and gloom. It was uplifting to see how the light could dispel the dark… Read More ›
Relapse dream replay
In that dream where I was drinking I could smell it, juicy red wine, and the smell was so real it’s like a part of me was actually drinking again and another part was thinking stop! but my whole face… Read More ›
The day the Ozzy died
After waking up the next favorite part of my day was going to bed. I curled my back in a yoga twist and lay facing the glow of the bistro lamps on the chicken coop. I woke and slept hard:… Read More ›
Still-life red
Woke late, found it October all of the sudden, took the route through the wooded valley off the Himmelsleiter. Got caught behind a class of students also taking the steps up but who mysteriously vanished. Pocketed a fresh chestnut fallen… Read More ›
Erste und Letzte (firsts and lasts)
That first walk up the Himmelsleiter was the best and darkest, my first morning back in Germany. The Himmelsleiter, that long set of narrow steps up the vineyards, through the spooky underpass beneath the train tracks in the dark, crossing… Read More ›
No quarter
It happened too soon, the season of repose, I turned in too soon Me on that ridge alone in the summer by the mountain with no one around for miles Coming upon a buck then a bear, my voice echoing… Read More ›
Last quarter
I walked to our neighborhood park, the one on the lake by our house. It gets a lot of traffic this time of year with the early morning anglers fishing off the dock and the teenagers and toddlers who flock… Read More ›