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
All the Time
I like to stand outside in the winter night, a glass of gin in my hand, and watch the sky go by above me, half moon a white lemon with its companion star, the star two stars, then one if I concentrate while the clouds veil and unveil it all, and my focus shifts between
Keep Moving
Just keep moving, across the open field and into the woods. Don’t look back until you reach the sea. Run until your lungs are ready to burst and every nerve shoots red-hot fire through your lost body, the soft sand under your feet, the salty air welcoming you home to the only place you understand,
Iranian Revolution 2026
In the old bazaars of Shiraz—where once the merchants weighed saffron by the gram—the fires now illuminate not spice, but anger. A boy, barely sixteen, lights a rag in a glass bottle. He’s not a thug, he’s a student who hasn’t seen meat in months. He’s not burning the bank for fun—he’s burning it for
A Poem on the Wind
A poem on the wind lands wherever it’s taken, whether in your thoughts or mine, or on the dry red soil, glittering in the summer heat. I can see the last of the species scribbling away in a fevered dream as the sun burns the ground, furnace in the lungs, vivid colors flooding the mind,
Looking for Real
The world I have come to know is just an artificial display of holographic shapes gliding across my line of sight and disappearing into nothingness, tedious reflections in a dull mirror. But every so often, someone comes along who is dramatically different, a living, breathing person, warm, radiant, true, and connected to my inner experience.