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 ›
Poetry
Low-angled light (for Rosemerry)
Low-angled light, especially in the morning, different angles of light at different times of the year. The low-angled light through the forest when it’s amber colored or even tawny if there’s wildfires. How the impressionists were drawn to that area… Read More ›
Grounded
It is now the time of the wildfires and web worms. The digital map of fire shows their size and location, and we look surrounded—though the air quality is still good. The web worms gather in clumps on certain kinds… Read More ›
The last time you tried to quit
You will go much further than you ever thought before you stop. You will even think I should quit, and yet you will keep going. You will do it time and again, and then you will say enough, you’ll stop… Read More ›
Burning man
Though it was early morning and a strange time to do it I lit a fire in the firepit with last night’s coals and the logs that were charred and dampened by the early morning rain. It could be hard… Read More ›
Landscape painting in a dental waiting room
Pale river rock of a moon cool to the touch. A notch someone cut in a log as a bench. What am I and this ego out here in the morning dark? Eno has a painting on a post card… Read More ›
Season’s surplus
There is more life than I can use, so I squander it on fruitless things like video games or bad books or going to bed early. The funny way life inches forward mostly unseen. The spring blooms that would bring… Read More ›
Father figure
Now gone a long time, you could vanish forever Both of you my patriarchs, gone the same year: Dick and John, father-in-law, stepdad Dick with your hands shaking holding the drill, helping you repair the front steps— John and your… Read More ›
Ninety-nine words or less
Not reams of it, but baskets full of bad poetry. Enough to take up the corner of a normal-sized room. Haphazardly put there without regard. Left-behind objects of nominal worth. Left out in the sun or the rain too long… Read More ›
The drive back from Portland
The drive back from Portland is not just a drive back from Portland, it’s every drive you’ve ever made. It’s the roadtrips with the family, the one you made to the Redwoods, the one with a girlfriend in the late… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 