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Addison County
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Melt
ice recedes the solid white pocks, goes white to gray gray to film to puddled puddled to lace between river rock bottom & ice top a melt hole grows a dark space shows cold winter air ice above, water below silent ice loosens to chortling water yellow pebbles water-churned rocks & stones melt hole joins melt hole ice recedes land wears no more snow no more winter river water as cold as ice
Wild Life
the river ice is half gone, a white field punctured by dark holes lace edged, daily longer & wider thick slabs undercut with melt shallow chuckling water ripples over yellow stones, rubs & rives at fallen trees, worn boulders invisible fish, & newts, frog spawn skims, & stopping to drink, a fisher a bobcat, brown bear & deer, raccoon & skunk, rabbit & mouse turkey & grouse, all those whose prints…
turkeys
four wild turkeys swashbuckle & bob thru deep snow where from? where to? does a wild turkey have a home base? or is it move along taste & see & move along settle here a while a night & move along
Jan 13 2026
the two gray squirrels might be puppet strung bound bound bound halt on two back feet nose at ice-furred snow survey stubbled field bound bound bound
Bristol Cliffs
driver door wide open, someone piles bricks on the gas pedal, turns the key, pops the clutch, & dives sideways into dry dirt, gravel, weeds while the car shoots forward & tips down the slope, bounces off rocks & carves divots in trees, whump crackle, metal dimples & groans another used-up ride the woods kindly clothes & claims as its own
Minutiae
in one liminal patch I find Morchella americana twenty-two morels such labyrinthine folds & Arisaema triphyllum a jack-in-the-pulpit its folded-over hood still hiding its striped interior they emerge beside dread invasives — garlic mustard, dame’s rocket — the few greens I’m willing to pull, as if I ruled this wild, this woods rim where I heap cat litter & tissues & egg shells heaps I hide under…
Small Sounds from the Kitchen
I listen three nights when a creature not one of the three of us prowls the dark until one morning a scratch, a scrape becomes my cat carrying a mouse the tail dangles a white neck shines the cat trots outside my other cat follows the end is a different story
Such Is
the burden of driving the hundred miles to visit friends or family, to consult on a project — that length of time, those dangerous roads — so one stays home, looks out the same windows onto the same trees, grass, driveway, road yet what comfort the known brings, the one mug filled with the favorite tea . . . I am most at risk between five & seven am, the time when I wake & make tea & read…
1964
the morning after my high school graduation a moving van pulls up out front of our New Jersey house United! it proclaims & while movers maneuver the contents of our house down the walk up the ramp into the dark tunnel stacked with blankets strung with belts & while my mother supervises the know-it-all yes’m no’m blue-jumpsuited crew I assemble a collection of what I might need for the rest of my…
End Game
yes, we too suffer while we watch & tend to the old & ill tend them when they know & we know it’s end game they tremble, dribble, moan embarrass & soil themselves still, we don’t deliver the dose are we making them pay for what they’ve done to us? only nature or some kinder god grants them their release later we advertise how long we forced them to endure
Paradiso Anagrams to Diaspora
I am in paradise not banished but instead where I would most wish to be because of fragments I live outside the outer world inside my own world though I don’t knit I’m knitting . . . long ago I wove my body my loom
Silk
the sussuration of S iffiness of a short I strength & resilience of an L scissor snip of a K silk blouses always pretending to slide off my shoulders silk blouses & trousers I gave away when I threw off the salaryman slog & moved to Hawaii off grid, forty acres of rainforest rain, mud, feral pigs rooting outside my windows the four-thousand meters of silk inside every silk moth cocoon
What It's Like to Fall @ 77 Years Old
I am hallucinating the out of doors because I am inside until further notice every window in my house brings me light, bare trees, snow on the ground indoors is this ugly aluminum walker in my lap a book about taking the walks Henry David Thoreau took . . . Cape Cod Mt Katahdin, Mt Wachusett . . . nearly two centuries ago people truly walked New England out of doors was country from here to there…
US Public High School, 2025
she tells me about a boy who comes to school filthy — clothes, skin, hair — I mean filthy, she says I wonder, does he never wash? has he no shower? no parents? no home? what brings him to school every day? he’s one of six students in her “intervention” group, students who are behind who do not learn, who cannot, she says, learn the parts of speech, though all of them can speak they know how to…
Air
every Palestinian child killed is someone I will never know you might say I wouldn’t know them anyway because before they’d have grown I’ll have died, & yet we might have exchanged fleeting gusts of air, theirs blown here from Rafah in Gaza, mine blown there from small town Vermont they bombed into fragments picked off by snipers skin & bones in a mother’s arms while I slow & slip & sink & succumb…
Pronouns
Ovid’s creation story is so predictably male — natus homo est — I expect Ovid saw homo as a white Roman male, a norm from which other colors & genders deviate. A priori, I reject homo & translate Ovid’s phrase as humans are born, not being snootish enough to opt for humanity is born , also not quite yet determined to feminize Ovid, nudge him toward woman is born — problematic, since my preferred…
Wintering Over
November days I scour the woods for windfall, blowdown . . . young trees the high winds tore or toppled, old trunks not yet rotted into fresh earth, uprooted white pine, its bark gone, pale dry limbs I snap off, drag & carry, align & pack down twigs & limbs & trunks all rise into great piles — over-winter dens for skunks & voles weasels, rabbits, & mice . . . a snow-clad mound mimes an igloo — now…
Black Swamp Gooseberry
I grasp the thorny-stalked, lobe-leafed plants near their base & yank up the roots, shallow & widely branched they leap from the soil, a wad of tangle no flowers, no fruit, too many thorns sheath all but the oldest stalks, thorns eager to snag my skin when I walk the woods, so I weed them out, as if I deserve to shape the woods, decide which plants live, which plants die which fallen limbs must be…
Hawaiian Land Snails
759 species identified more than 300 species extinct they cannot travel backward their shells are already fossils snails emit & follow slime preferably slime of kin or friend Hawaiians hear snails sing a sound like crickets maybe it’s the sound of wind crossing an open operculum snails are hermaphrodites, not she nor he but they . . . also they mate one’s sperm for the other’s egg sperm to use now…
Dukes Barbecue
the wait staff sets checkered tables with salt pepper, ketchup, napkins, & a loaf of white bread what we called Wonder Bread when I was a child the loaves are sealed in plastic, & we never open them, never eat a slice, but work crews do as do ginormous fat men, we wonder aloud whether open loaves are replaced between diners why eat bread when once you pay for your meal you can go back for more as…
Red Is the Color of China
my brother dug a deep, then deeper hole the backyard hole to nowhere what kind of a family allows for that kind of hole? through the earth to the other side, he said like the cop who dug until his shovel hit something solid, the wrist of a murdered woman if you dig long enough you might find the why . . . accident, crime, bad blood, old age . . . knowing the why doesn’t relieve the ache from the…
Capital Punishment
two states choose to execute two convicted men perhaps they did wrong, perhaps they did no wrong twenty plus years in prison means nearly every cell in the men’s bodies has been replaced three times their bodies remake themselves yet can’t shed their criminal identification . . . now they’re dead to satisfy someone’s powerful urge to rule others because each of us individually cannot rule ourself…
Self Portrait
a framed pencil sketch hangs cattycorner from my crib an amateur’s rendering of a hand, a baby’s head, a wrist someone thought the execution good enough to frame, good enough to hang in a baby’s room parts of a baby for the baby ivory paper, smudged gray lead clear glass, a black frame how old am I when I recognize my own self? dissected the parts refuse to cohere, head without a neck, hand here…
The Hidden Bones of a Wall
a sawdust-clotted web an earwig’s fractured corpse one sawzall a halftone below the other explains what cannot be explained the idea that humans are gods witness this wheelchair pope colonizer, predator peel back his whited robe shrive him, skin alive him let gall pollute the cracked soil boiled from the blood of commoners they creep up behind you nodding stickseed, six-legged prey species begin…