Poetry
Poetry
The Stare of the Dying (for Richard and Sophie)
The dying stare beyond you into some other world when you look into their eyes. They gaze intently beyond your care, your grief, beyond your dream. Tonight, you stare up toward where my friend sang his last song, silenced as he was. He’d been gone a day, and where you look now, a bird sang,
Act
Late summer had toasted the grass and weeds, But in the field I found a dandelion ghost, A perfectly spherical puffball of a hundred seeds. I pinched it off and huffed and watched the seeds coast On the random eddies, out, out from my breath Over the exhausted field, like paratroops let from a plane
Reflection of a Latent Form: The Source of Consciousness
Whatever concept an artist imagines Is a reflection of a latent form that lies within A block of marble; the hand alone, Guided by the intellect, can give it form. from Michelangelo’s Sonnet 15 The “reflection of a latent form” Michelangelo characterizes in his poem has inspired debate among artists, aesthetes, and philosophers for thousands of
Recycling a Well-Tended Garden
Recycling a Well-Tended Garden She side-bends and stoops after decades of puttering limber-up work-in-dirt yoga, knee bends to growing graces. Her garden sprawls on its back, open palms to June sun, humming a hover and rest like the blue darner. Her fingers spread compost, sifting the strumming of vegetable patches into mantras – mantras learned
Cottonwoods of October
There’s a sound that the early autumn wind makes through the cottonwoods across the way (all dash and whisper and sway) that is the sound of a faraway whistle caught on a thread of unraveling distance from an old coal train heading west; it is the sound of the last of the Canada geese hefting
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Novels and Collected Works
The Stare of the Dying (for Richard and Sophie)
The dying stare beyond you into some other world when you look into their eyes. They gaze intently beyond your care, your grief, beyond your dream. Tonight, you stare up toward where my friend sang his last song, silenced as he was. He’d been gone a day, and where you look now, a bird sang,
Act
Late summer had toasted the grass and weeds, But in the field I found a dandelion ghost, A perfectly spherical puffball of a hundred seeds. I pinched it off and huffed and watched the seeds coast On the random eddies, out, out from my breath Over the exhausted field, like paratroops let from a plane
Reflection of a Latent Form: The Source of Consciousness
Whatever concept an artist imagines Is a reflection of a latent form that lies within A block of marble; the hand alone, Guided by the intellect, can give it form. from Michelangelo’s Sonnet 15 The “reflection of a latent form” Michelangelo characterizes in his poem has inspired debate among artists, aesthetes, and philosophers for thousands of
Recycling a Well-Tended Garden
Recycling a Well-Tended Garden She side-bends and stoops after decades of puttering limber-up work-in-dirt yoga, knee bends to growing graces. Her garden sprawls on its back, open palms to June sun, humming a hover and rest like the blue darner. Her fingers spread compost, sifting the strumming of vegetable patches into mantras – mantras learned
Cottonwoods of October
There’s a sound that the early autumn wind makes through the cottonwoods across the way (all dash and whisper and sway) that is the sound of a faraway whistle caught on a thread of unraveling distance from an old coal train heading west; it is the sound of the last of the Canada geese hefting