To be published in the November, 2025 issue of The 34th Parallel .

Our Peculiar Garden

You walk in the door
with half a pail
of yellow gall.
 
You’ve tended all
the mysterious places,
on our lands.
You grew a tree
where my face
once filled with parables.
I remember the day
your green hands braided
the rich earth and made
a scourge to purify
our sloppy lives.
 
So now I stop and suffer,
to consider both
the lilies of the field
and that darn unlucky
fig tree.
 
You walk in
with a familiar
tension.  But we
need not toil, nor will we spin,
apparently.
Every fear formed by your steps
is a path. A lesson
of how blood will loosen.
A lesson of opening eyes.
 
These seeds of fate
fall from a lazy grip
to redeem the fallow fields
on their own. It works
if you work it. And also if you don’t.
I agree with you, though.
Our garden’s fruit waits.
“Time to get your hands dirty,” you say.
 
Seize these hands then, too.
They want to be green
before it’s too late.

 To be published in the Fall 2025 edition of the journal The Bridge

I Broke a Leg Where Pilgrim Feet Once Trod

Scene: the mountains in fall. Anthony sits cross-legged at a campfire. He’s ready for action.

Anthony: I feel no feeling. It’s from this habitual numbness I punch down. The culture made of memory and edited history both numbs me and stirs up my just Cause.  Then it ambulates away from the Effects. Scot free and cheating at taxes, this is what will make me walk like a rich man, right? Walking on borrowed time with no shame.  So I reach out from screen and page and ask you to join me in a landscape of silent valleys. Let’s shatter these earthen jars full of dissembling parchment, let’s let go of the fragments. With the icy fists of poetic license let’s punch a thesaurus, a genealogy, a hierophant’s foot. I complain to the manager that no starting point was scripted, no basecamp imagined for this set piece. The I/thou dialogue in this box of words gets tangled up, pushed into dry paragraphs, and trips over its own workshopped feet. This is the last pilgrimage of autumn, of papyrus and symbols unknown, and it is not the dance you wanted. Twist the bones before the plot, then backspace. The low angles of light allow erasures and mistakes. The fog comes on club feet, and we stumble, parched, toward an ancient reliquary, the Rule gone wild.

(Director’s cut): Wipe dissolve to a wilderness site. Step by step to the foot of the mountain where he set up camp, sidetracked and firewalled by the washes and arroyos, the dried aspens, high desert juniper, all ready for the deluge to come.  Future destinations spread like cottonwood seeds climbing in air. Where? The head holds the map. The head conspires to smuggle messages to the feet.  The feet are ready for any hubbub, though they prefer he not know there is no feeling.  Neuropathic insolence. The heavy demand of awareness weighs on his extremities and abbreviates timespans. Ah, but the gig is, in fact, up.  The film noir’s credits rolled at the beginning. Now he knows that art just obfuscates, assumes what is unwarranted success. It’s all entertainment to disguise death and old age.  I (footnote: this is the director’s voice) don’t think, though, his place in a cave is cinematic enough. Let’s put him on a path open to the elements.

Anthony: Here at the foot of a majestic cedar I stop to collect the debt accruing in your hands too. I pull the map from your cerebral cortex.  The games will start now, the character development and conflict. You think this is easy? Do you prefer nursery rhymes?  I pull you through the screen into my body, and with this alchemy we can transform the numbness into song. Ok, maybe not song, but spoken language. Ok, maybe not language, but a website.

Review from Cahiers du Cinéma: Appendages convey letters, single file sentences.  Lines enjambed to wither the smidgen of your patience left.  The point (both sharp and dulled) is to find a trail to new breath, new lungs, interconnected neurons with name tags for the icebreaker … oh yes, the body reimagining itself with precious mistakes.  The fine print at the bottom of it. No feeling, where there once was feeling.  Words where there was once a canyon of silence. 

Anthony: Oh sweet lord, dry my feet with your hair. These conundrums are toes.  This little piggy went to market.  The desert fathers are bereft of new ideas. Just find me one true trail to get all the way home, is that too much to ask? What, was that my job?  I hear the French circumlocution here in the Eastern Sierras.  It says, “Tony, heads up!” I play the old soundtrack, a disintegrated loop. Mistakes prove that impermanence is the only way forward.

The Review (cont.): The final frame also has limits and unforeseen expectations. We walk, hobbled and humbled, out of the theater, with this wild hunger, with this borrowed body, one painful step at a time. It surprises no one that the rain has begun.

Anthony: Pilgrim, there is no camino. The absence of maps cuts right to the bone. The loss of the old world is a lamp to my feet.

Published in the Fall 2025 edition of Accidental Magazine.  A cheery poem about dementia, loss, and the beauty of companionship.

Sundowning

When the day turns 
and bends away from us
I call you by name
though you do not hear me.

You close your doors; 
light is your brief foe.
Or so you tell me
as you ambush even yourself.

You draw shades
with lead. You swallow the poison
just to make sense.

“I arm myself against you
by drowning,” you offer.  
You salt our memory with this one-way truth.

How I yearn to navigate the book of your life!
I ask you to fetch facts
off the erased pages of your journal
and instead you mark canvas lifeboats 
on a wide and silent sea.
Entries float on each other.
Palimpsest distractions play on neurons,
vellum, and vanity. In place of speech
your hands catch fish. 
You mute confusion with aphasia and mudras.
You remember that in the nunnery
the sign of honey is to set your finger on your tongue.

“Look, dear one, my blood dries on a finger like ink.
Turn around, let me write the password
on your back, then rub away my mistakes,
and tell you storm lies,” I try to sound like rain.
You chuckle when I slap
the bee I pretend is there.
There is sweetness in this familiarity, 
though your laughter isn’t yours.
It comes from another day.

*
This page loses all the words
you scratched in me.

I make a topic sentence to hold
your cold synapses. Then a sonnet of denials.
All to ease the swelling.

I bend this sentence to fit in your hands
just as eventide folds my fear 
into rabbit’s ears of rain.
I beg you to recall
when we ducked for shelter
under eaves whose music  
was the rattle of small birds 
then we slow-danced
in redemptive syncopation.
Your blind contentment was relentless.
How I loved being your mute safe harbor.

But now time has swapped our senses 
and dried the details of your touch,
the scent of your closeness,
the music of your breath,
the wild beauty of your conclusions.
Now your body arms itself
with high tide and low expectation.

This sentence refuses to surface
from the gathering murk, the stumbles.
Its three words are cartoon fingers.
I promised honey from rock 
but I failed you.
As if to prove I am a dupe, I confirm
my wild addiction to the folly 
of our hasty bodies, and how now
dusk’s torch song
forms a foreign tongue in our ears. 
I see tonight that the kaleidoscope 
of your eyes will never
friend my skin again. 
I don’t know our end,
but three words sink, waiting.

*
At dinner I tie a bib on these words.
The words that would fill the air 
with the world 
should you hear them.

But it’s too late, my comrade.
We’ve already picked the pocket of time.
The silver pole holding up the universe
falls with the sun.
In this hour before skunks
the shimmer and glare
of cause and effect decline.
The machine freezes and steals our life.

Evensong sharpens its edge
to cut the pattern of our dwindling. 

*
                 Error, error, fatal error.
We’ve forgotten this operating system
came from stars
even if it will not last another night.

Supper’s ready and we grimace 
and bare teeth. We eat eternity.
We fooled the facial recognition test --
the surrender to hypervigilance
misses what’s true.

It stings, this bitter grace.
Your face cuts into me
with a voice that calls my name.
The luminous emptiness
reveals it wasn’t you 
who had turned from light, but I.
It was I who did not hear your call.
It was your voice naming me.

Now a silence curates our 
long loneliness.
A loneliness that holds us together
more tightly than ever.

 Published in September, 2025 in Liebestraum Review

A Reckoning

Old Sisyphus sets the table slowly. Guests are a big deal now.
The Librarian is coming for supper.
She’ll bring the history of ideas.
 
It is late in the year and the long reach of the afternoon
so sunlight streams in acute angles through this room --
slow autumn light shines on dust motes rising like tired little angels.
 
Old S is tired too. The only stones he pushes now are in his kidney.
He stays inside for days and follows the shifting light
to see it change the room in endless afternoons; to see time fall.
 
Tonight, though, he’ll meet her to settle effects and their causes.
He will admit to her he can’t keep up at all.
Speed no longer feeds him and these hills are too steep.
 
At the head of this trestle table he’ll place human error.
That’ll be his chair where they’ll negotiate the death they share
and then map how the mortal mind always misses the point.
 
She’ll come at sunset, her arms loaded with scrolls –
long lists of appeals, old stipulations,
a faulty memory, and lives of purpose scribed on parchments.
 
He knows what she’ll ask of him when she comes.
She’ll ask him to free them all from his needy heart’s ache. 
 
*
There in the corner of the dining room wait
papers he’ll show her. The bloodwork from the lab,
under a cucurbit of dried mushrooms and madrone twigs.
 
And the overdue book on Plotinus he promised
to return to her. She’ll forgive him.
She always does. It is her act. A dance of withered figs.
 
Now he hears her hooves scratch at the door.
His best and last offer will be to open it. He takes a breath
to prepare himself for the curse of silence they’ll explore.
 
His wobble shames him. His unbalance bores her. 
Oh his wrinkled cherished hand smooths his hair
then opens the polished door to see her there.
 
*
 
He could ask her to dance,
but he won’t.
 
He could offer drinks from the river of consolation,
but he won’t.
 
So they will hold each other
until they don’t.
 
There is work to do. Even ancient trees live to produce fruit.
They exhaust the light on this longest of nights.
 
Every idea waits for them, patient as blood.
Then she wraps a spell around the philosopher’s stone.
 
She points to where he sits and says, “if this makes you feel special,
dismiss it. Not even your mistakes are real.”
 
He thinks she sounds like his mother, the punishment and calcination.
His origin is in her and what’s left of fire passes from one life
 
to another.  At last they scratch at their saddle of human aspiration
and lie to each other like husband and wife.
 
But it is an accounting, not love, she came for. The books are closed.
The parchments rolled out nothing but dust and mold.
 
This poem, this skin of utterance, is an impermanent fool,
and all fools die, turn to stone, and roll down
 
the mountain. On the peak’s lee side epithets huddle
to pay and purify his delinquent fees. S agrees to these cold terms.
 
So done and signed, she rings the bells.  Work is over.
Now she is his dream to wake from,
 
with a red coal on his tongue.
The new ash will make an earth in his sleep.
And the season of sleep is finally here.

 A chapbook of poems, Inept Love, will be published in 2026 by Finishing Line Press

Prose poems to published summer, 2025, in Le Culturae: issue 2: Quotitidian

A Puzzling Parade in Which Poets Experience Aphasia Purely as a Ploy to Gain Sympathy from Their Captors 

"No presence had ever been so present to him as the child's absence."

Jean Genet, Funeral Rites

The fathers grew trees whose wood burns thought.  Empty pyres wait us out. Absence sanctifies these mounds and circles.  The land holds its history close to the vest.  My birth mysteriously remained behind to plant praedial mimodrames if not clues.  My bones cut into rubrics discerning pain. Tossed on the earth to testify my fortune and release.  They scribe in place of speech, a palimpsest scripture of wounds.  Fucking peasants living the death-dream hollowness.  Signing it away they too long for silent light.  They pledge to live as unordained stars, not for this particular earth and its catalogues of shade.  But the fine traces they left still seduce, they whisper to possess us.  They pretend they are our lovers.  They'll give themselves to us, to make a name for ourselves.  They embody birth to certify and re-invent figures for a lost ancestry.  They argue a hewn contiguity of mirrors.  Consanguineous web. Even the original explanations trail off…

…are these the translated crumbs?  Dad? Jailer? You want me to pick up each and follow deeper into the forest?  Not all bitterness can be eaten. I am a fisherman, tying knots. Taboos camp about my lips.  They unravel knots, leaving the threads themselves to clot the laceration of speech. Now when I sleep I pull in my double.  The mark on me is mirrored in him.  Now the dreams will compete for sovereignty above us.  The rusted chain of being.  The links themselves leave us alone.  Jesus, it’s about time. The scribes have bound me.  The moment I became aware of it, they struggled in me.  Hobbled me.  I'm rolling in the hay.  They're leading me away in a line with others.  After pasting sunrise on my belly and sunset on the back of my skull, they knocked a hole in the middle of my face.  They are thieves of the actual. I sit with two old men.  They argue.  One plucks feathers from a dead bird, dipping them in cool blood, marking here and there.  Then the other rises to struggle to take all the feathers and throw them into the fire. Together, we three hear the sound sizzling through the woods.  Stones are piled.  Marks are slashed on the trunks of trees.  But I'm not able to follow yet.  I cannot decide whether to scatter their stones.  Or make twenty six new piles of my own devices.  Or give my eyes a substance to mend the bark.  Or deliver a cacophony of gashes on every tree I reach. Stretching, I mime immortality, this is what it could look like. I am interested in seeing these little boxes pinned to paper.  They win us over with a sniff, a kick and a scream.  They win, place and show in the lupine games set before our memory crashed.  They wear a wolf’s nerves and breath. The four walls of the forest whiten as if draining a fat wound.  Systems are left in this blanching.  Hands grapple to regain their color.  The beginning of the sentence is hooked to one wall, the end to its opposite.  There is nothing, really, in the broken bones between. The fishermen convene in the next clearing.  They hush each other, but now and then I hear a raw, impelled voice.  There's an old story drying on these rocks.  Someone once went to steal what the fishermen were saying.  They wanted to know the one word allowed in the net.  This story confirms that the one who hears it never returns.  They are bitter codgers and crones whispering about yesterday.  The origin story simplified for popular consumption. I am taking up this iron and feather hammer.  I am smashing all the rocks here, the rocks with the strange marks.   I'm leaving one provisionally intact.  It has the one word left on it.  Then I leave the hammer in an empty hand forged from the desire to know.  Two of us agreed.  Two of us asked the fathers.  Really, why wait? The chains bother me only a little.  It’s a small measure of comfort to see that the one who must march in front of me is in a similar predicament.  I only see his back but I can imagine well that the little words infesting his skin also eat in his ears like mine, and scab over his eyes like mine.  There are two chains connecting me to him.  One leaves my mouth alone, the other I think is in my hand, dropping traces on the ground.  It matters not at all which is noticed first. The plan apparently is that at night we must stop.  And then choose to sleep in a fire or be exposed by darkness. Your call…or simply pull me into the mute flames too.  The measure of suffering is not what you can endure.  The emptiness itself is as luminous as you need. As we need. No point charting what is not there.  The prisons after planes confirm that liberty and freedom are not the same but that both can vanish in a sea breeze, a fire, or a net trawling the evening skies to catch the ancient stars. No land will be conquered.  No soul shaped for their whims.

Humans and Humans

I’m a needle looking for a thread. Your thread, any thread. What once made whole cloth now rips the human head. So I weave knots in this web of webs, waiting for wind. 

Sit with me, let’s listen, a chorus unravels before us. Gut-check a poet’s endnotes* Devotion is purchased online. The apple’s original sin was that a human touched it and made up stories about it later. Fabricated a tapestry of excuses, invented a sleep. Then a snake.  Against the familiar flora marked by the poet’s decades of sensible boots, I want to know how he left these lies.  He found nothing between him and the bones that matched, and oh what a wing dive of assurance he wove with them. I cannot know this dirt and smell of leaves and still water there in Blackwater woods.  I, like you, am basted to this screen, your screen, any screen.  I click the button to buy fake silence. It’ll come tomorrow, thrown in the ivy.

I read what he left, surprise still legible until this borrowed account expires. His words leave sacred silence but my fetters still form. For instance, a campfire in the high Sierra plunders my version of verse. Fire proxies my cradle of norms.  And how do you explain how the lifetime of witness that is in my hands fell from a screen of commerce? This is a different set of emperor’s clothing.  It must be.

Here's the deal, truth may no longer be beauty. We know too much now. Everything is at hand and our hands are missing.  Fifty years of her artfully perfect puzzles bookmarked on the menu bar and I still lose the thread in my own terse fifty minutes in a middlebrow office with an MFC. An inner inmate sews a child’s memory of jail.  Parenting reverses to show the tags. So, failing cuffs, what does keep me strung along if not sitting in the custody pondering text? The data of my head’s curse: sitting zazen in these [terse] probations? The archived social media site of the Hero’s Journey hosts a pattern of multiple likes.  The kid wants attention and is addicted to the fear of not being liked. The Blackwater poet’s way prioritizes search results with the key words of letting go®. This must be wisdom unable to be shared, given its ancient provenance.

Can I ask him with the marble-white skin to come back from death to save our cult of ex-believers? From the tribe of aces, a dirty sleeve kidnaps my poems. I do apologize, I ask too many shaded questions. It’s so unwise. We both know that devotion only flows from pure dots, easily connected.  Seamless heartlines.

Stopping in traffic with you. Pressing refresh. Waiting to board with you.  How much is lost by grabbing sun or moon on demand. Controlling the heavens means we have lost control.  Flattened by singularity. Sending you an attachment.  Attaching what’s left of you. Looking for a parking place with you in the passenger’s seat. Walking through the oily, fragrant eucalyptus grove with you in the mind’s eye, a camel’s coat of partial, partial touch and letting go (your credit card is saved, you have permission to use this, to use me).

 Poems published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal May, 2025.

The Broken Tree

you are out on Bear Mountain
like a pilgrim
with an empty quiver --
you’re hunting nothing
but pines and manzanitas
walking on logging roads
whose pitch, crown
and water berms
of gravel and clay
stumble your feet –
you needed to breathe
the trees today
 
you look up
to hurried clouds
of a storm coming soon
and so you’ll stumble home
 
you know
there is an uncanny tree --
a tree you named --
on the other side
of this mountain
 
you’ll pass by the tree --
a redwood that stands
among others of its kind
all straight as telephone poles --
tall redwoods piercing the sky
with limbs as thin as spears
to snap in storms
and stab a man
to briskly make a widow
 
although you are man
with a husband,
he’d be bereft too
should winds launch
these lovely spears at you
 
the pilgrim’s way
has just the right risk
 
*
this tree you’ve named bends
unlike the others --
huge branches bred
to stretch the air
and run parallel to earth --
branches thick as a trunk
 
the strange arms spread
to stretch against
the common nature
against the usual world
as though to welcome
both inverted wayfarers
and hungry grey squirrels      
 
a candelabra of spongy bark --
an icon of oddity
sparking with its inordinate form
a fire of queer beauty
 
you found her years ago --
and only because
you lifted your head
did you see her damaged
crown of craggy snares --
a lightning strike many years ago
fired strange harm at her --
an arrow of flames
lopped off her top
and forged the odd defacements
that widened arms to welcome
you to her world
 
you congratulated yourself
for noticing, for lifting your head --
you take more credit than due you
and ponder how a poem
could tell this broken story
and doing so
could open
your own disproportions
even as you journey
to Canterbury, Santiago,
Bodh Gaya or your own mailbox
filled with bills
 
widows weeds
and screens
that scorch your wisdom
wait at home
after rain, this rain
and this road to her
 
*
the path of letting go
falls under the broken tree
and here the quiver of the nameless
tugs on your shoulder
and still you call
her Sophia, thinking
 
you were Adam
allowed
to name it all,
to make the sounds
and rhymes
to sing her song
 
she’s there downslope now
and you walk to her
in a high wind of hope
then hear a drought-dry madrone
crash and crack close by
 
there’s danger in these trees
 
a rumble of hard rain 
makes you stop --
you tire of toting
this bag of emptiness
 
you touch her three times
and, courageously, you ask her
to tell the thunder
to pull you
out of yourself
into the trees
and beyond --
you ache to go beyond
 
a few wet birds scurry and hop
at her feet where
they sing storm warnings
in the raining air
 
*
the quest narrows
without arrows
 
rainwater washes
your brow, your own salt
stings your eyes
yet you cannot turn
from her now
you sense
she senses you and gives you sense
 
you call her by her name
you believe it is her name
though it comes from the Bible,
movies, and the holy spirits
that aim your feet against the road
 
it’s like you’ve named each other
it’s like you toss atoms back
and forth to levy and load
time and space into your pack --
to make a possible
life with thick arms too --
arms spread wide
to hold all harm
as sacred proof
of how truth shatters
just enough to join the tree
and you, and whoever
hears a name uttered
in storms you cannot hide
 
it’s like you are ready
you are ready for what’s next
three touches on her rough wet skin
and you tell her
 
“let me say your name
and change my life”

Seeds

you’ve bushwacked now
up to a sawtooth ridge
near Bear Creek Spire
 
in a crevasse
in this crag of granite
two old junipers cling to the rock
 
they flatten their trunks
to join
in a small pocket of dirt
 
trunks like big barrels
have grown from a fissure
as wide as a wrist
 
ragged branches
hold dark green fans
up to the Sierra sun
 
*
 
a trunk will narrow
as much as it needs to live --
no limit is the answer to the question you did not ask
 
your body does not differ
and clings to rock as well --
from bone your fruits form
 
two trees reach out from your spine
from these old seeds in a small dark fracture --
you are shown how to survive in high places
 
the narrow seeds from shifting stars
implant in bones every day
to make a way from slender clay
 
to a sun of limits, known and unknown
though you have not loved others as yourself
you have not shifted with your whole heart
 
no matter, forgiven and forged by this granite bone
in this blinding blue mountain’s day
you confront the face of weathered stone
 
where the spine’s marrow seeds join
for a brief green breath, a true breath
that in this light reveals how narrow life can turn
                                                                                
seeds will not waste your dirt or sky --
they find cracks in your façade
wide enough to grow your narrow little life
 
that widens with the mercy
of juniper and rock
found in hidden heights