First, turn on the lights. Ghosts drift toward shadows. Use the sin of omission as if it was a life raft, and you can’t swim. I can swim, of course. As a child I swam in tanks, throwing rocks before getting into the water to scatter the snakes while my mother doled out advice like,…

From the colonial gravesites where I walked mourning and grazing with my dog,   to this father’s day, flag-day starred banners curling in the cemetery heat;   in the juniper bushes, three cloudy blue egg-gems huddle in a secret woven nest;   the sudden agreeable sight of comfortable hills folded into passages winding down to…

I was tuning up and knew today’s the day flat, unchanged note the steel string twanged sharp and snapped   I can’t remember when it was new when had I last made love to my nude guitar all 12 strings unwound from keys now draped to the floor – her 12 pegs rooted just below…

I don’t always awake with a smile on my lips, or sleep with mystery surrounding me. Sometimes I am day without morning and other times I am night without moonlight. It’s when I get up and see all gray that I am more myself, this soul lost in live shadows and nothing to comfort me,…

Something about seeing a preserved butterfly’s wings pinned back makes me think about mercy, about how   Nabokov drew each wing as delicately as some braid hair. I would like to unspool each lingering strand of air never touched by harsh animal chaos   and patches of dust never written on by wings. Some days…

A brief kiss by two lovers on the street, given hurriedly without thought.  Even the moonlight doesn’t make them linger. I say, if you’re going to kiss goodbye do it like you mean it, never hurry.     If my lover were here on this same street I would grab the hair on the back…