smoke

 smoke, bitter orange

sky banner, hot woolen wrap

tight around my throat

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

The Prose Poem

The Prose Poem has   one of my poems up: "No-One in the World." This published version is considerably shorter than the one posted on this blog, as the journal had a word limit for submission. It's always fun whittling a piece down like this.

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Autumn Drizzle, Autumn Dew

Listen—can you hear the drip of gutters?

It’s not really raining, just mist

condensing on the roof.

 

Listen, can you hear thunder?

No, it’s airplanes coming in, low-ceiling,

and humid air carries sound better.

 

And do you hear a rumble,

earth shaking underfoot, overpasses

tremble in a high wind—

 

no, it’s feet marching into downtown,

making the towers sway and scrape the clouds

wringing out water, rain, at last the end of drought.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

A Bead of Liquid Light

The streetlight across the way is buried in foliage. At night, it illuminates the leaves underneath and immediately around it. Little or no light reaches the street and sidewalk, but from an upstairs window I can see a patch of bright green, a little island in the darkness.

Tonight it's raining, one of those stand-alone late August rains that tells us the Pacific is stirring, thinking about waking up and blowing storms into the mouth of the Columbia and over the Coast Range. Water accumulates on top of the streetlight. A couple of times a minute, it drips: a bead of liquid brilliance falls through the leaves, through the light, into the dark below.

 

bright leaves overhead

long fall into the unknown

dark water below

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

Red Dog Pack

Fire is a pack of red dogs

racing through dry grass. Spark-yellow eyes

and snarling breath. Their tails wave

black against the sky.

 

Fire is a red dog pack

tearing through underbrush, chewing at trees.

The red dogs swallow forests,

spit ash and splinters.

 

Fire is the midnight howl

that wakes you from dreaming about rain,

that’s not a train and not coyotes.

Red dogs on the hunt.

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside

My Favorite Mug

dark blue stoneware

 

          white chip

 

crack branching like

 

          paths into forest

 

seeping        water

 

          broken

 

Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside