when the moon is high on the fringe of town,
just beyond city lights and street signs,
the empty glow of neon blinks against a backdrop
of deep blue, (almost black but not quite),
freckled with luminous stars.
it’s the echo of a shepherd barking
in the mountains, chained outside
to a white picket fence, waiting
for an answer that will never come.
it’s the trickle of water in the koi pond
next door, recycled in an artificial route,
spewing bubbles and waiting for evaporation.
it’s the creak of my rocking chair as I fold
my knees to my chest and hug them,
the way I did when I was five, sitting in darkness
because the porch light burned out
and I’m too tired to replace it.
now the dog has stopped barking
and a mosquito buzzes close to my ear,
and in the distance, the absence of crickets
makes silence the loudest sound I've ever heard.

I am the first page of a well-loved novel,
But often the first one ignored,
Dog-eared and transparent at the corners
From the touch of one too many hands
And witness to the enterprising twist of a smile
As my readers are privileged to only pieces of me.

You, like the binding that surrounds me,
Enclose and encircle all that I am. Write a novel
Under my skin. I’ve falsified too many smiles,
Sacrificed even the best of myself for ignorant
Delusions of caressing hands
That take and abuse my corners.

The used bookstore on the corner
Of Middlebury Marbleworks, Otter Creek and window-origami —
My salvation and river-penance. Seek my story with hands
That feel to comprehend, with novel
Softness and a tenderness that ignores
My pleading glances and indecisive smiles

As you speak in hush-whispers. Smile
With your eyes as you touch my spine — corner
Me at the exit. I want you to ignore
Faults, make peace with flaws that inhabit me
Like poetry misplaced within a novel,
Or willow branches falling too low, tired hands.

I memorized the shape of your hands
The first time we danced to Chaplin’s “Smile,”
And wrote on the broadness of your shoulders a novel
Of my sins, apologies stretching to your corners
In villanelles — repeating refrains. It took all of me
To tell you what I could no longer ignore.

Because once you start to ignore
Conflictions that exist in the nerve-endings of your hands,
What you feel becomes a burden. For me,
Sand ran out of the hourglass when our smiles
Stopped touching — and at the corner
Of Maple Street and Printer’s Alley, I said goodbye, our novelty

Gone. Still, I find it hard to ignore what used to be when you smile
As you look at her, your hands on her back in the corner
Of the room. You remain my unfinished novel.

Cross-petals of daffodils sway to the cries
Of starlings – stark shrieks and minute iridescent
Wing-beats – while the willows whistle,
Tumultuous as feathers caught in the wind.
Like the fragrant taste of rain, you tell me
About mistakes made by people in love,
How temptations of her white heron-legs
And meadowlark voice stole your attention,
Like flies drawn into the range of a bullfrog’s tongue.
Your words meet heartbeats under tremolos
Of wild grasses with olive and mauve sprouts,
Lingering beneath brewing oyster clouds.
You adorned yesterday with honeybee stings
And barbed crescendos of climbing roses,
But tomorrow brings sweet-tongued
Hummingbirds and thrumming choruses
As your soft-spoken daylily promises
Dissolve silence into adoration.

A score ago I was born anew
Bright and untarnished
Tightly wound and certain.
Well family tries
And some settle to half-achieved dreams,
Fulfilled and furbished
While others are lost –
Unfurled in guilty pleasures
And tangled in thoughts of better things.
I need to be released
From this wood-walled prison
Of black walnut and self-inflicted doubt
Which haunts like closed doors
And compresses with relentless pressure.
I am a spool unraveled
In an antique Singer machine drawer
Long forgotten and unkempt –
Built to hold but prone to breaking.
Silver tweed-threaded silk
Faded gray through a pigeon hole
And lost amongst my brothers.
I long to recoil in sweet harmony
Of crimson and gold memories,
Where happiness flits
Like a cardinal on cedar in winter
Bright and striking and secure
Confident in an unruly storm –
Warm and rich against the cold.
Well my Soul came back to me
In the gentle tap-tap keys
Of a 1958 Royal Standard,
Smooth-dipped and powder-blue-painted
With an olive case worn at the edges
From being touched by the fingertips
Of pained poets and weary travelers.
There’s a beauty in the black noir made colorful
By resplendent dreams and truth made real
And the principle of gentle permanence
And not-so-fragile finality
Of flaws made perfect by being
Simply and utterly themselves.

El oro, cuando lo golpea, brilla.


I want to stand at 3,082 meters
On the overlook above Machu Picchu — close
Enough to the edge so my timid toes
Flirt with wild columbine and teeter

On white granite stones laid centuries ago.
Speak to me the way the Andes
Breathe cumulus clouds phthalo blue. Seek
Answers in the form of temples. Slow

Down time in the Room with Three Windows —
Hanan-Pacha: bless my fears with conviction.
Kay-Pacha: reject this earth’s mundane affliction.
Ukju-Pacha: watch my seedling-soul as it grows.

Move with me in cyclical certainty from ruin
To reverence, beyond what words can measure —
Even the old Peruvian proverb for treasure.
Our trials make us mountains among humans.

This, my friends, is an anthem –
For the ones who feel small; the introverts,
The ones who believe in things so much
They can feel it in their bones, yet at the end
Of the day refuse to believe in themselves.
You are all beautiful.
I don’t mean that in the socially-constructed,
Warped, narrow-minded sense of the word.
You are beautiful for your raw, honest souls
Your unique individuality, and the love
For every living thing you pour outward
In a radial, sunshine-spritzing way –
Promise me you won’t forget to love yourselves in return.
Yes, you, the ones who believe in second chances,
Big droplets of rain, the first snowfall of winter,
And the rejuvenating cycle of leaves.
The ones who believe in the sound
Of typewriter keys and songbirds
And the beauty of stars after a long day.
If all other things deserve the greatest joy
We call happiness, then so, my dear,
Beautiful soul-friends, deserve all the happiness
This great big world can contain.

Wind chimes dangle from her ears,
Whispering in sweet clarity all the sounds
Of a riverbed in June, telling you about the sun,
The moon and the stars in a way I never could.

Tell me what she said to make you forget –
You once called me your kaleidoscope.

—for Mariel



She sells 2 sole paltas beside street  
vendors who whistle at crop-top-clad girls,
spewing profanities complete
with broken English. She has four girls
hungry at home. They dream of science, stars,
constellations that spiral and sparr
with particles that make us what we are —

interrupted by howling dogs, the 5
AM tamale man, and stray **** crows.
Amid dust-clouds of Zona D, the sun arrives
over the peak Luis claims once exposed
his innocent eyes to an angel: one
tale of faith raised on culture come undone
presently. Poet Andrea Gibson

writes, “I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about
the Big Bang.’ And the sun said, ‘it hurts to
become.’” At dusk, Mariel takes a Combi out
sixteen stops from Quince, up 302
steps to a turquoise shack and a red rose
garden, and plants avocado seeds at her toes.
Poco a poco, se anda lejos.

Fissures cut through thick mocha fur, saturating
The forest floor with stark crimson. The deer flails,
Broken, knees buckled, breath shallow and emerging
As vanishing steam in frosty November air.
He falls on a bed of sugar maple leaves, illuminated
In dappled sunlight and fulvous hues.

“Must’ve been the coyotes,” my brother whispers,
As my pocketknife meets the stag’s throat. Gentle
Auburn clouds and freezes time, the body falls still.

My father says, “Sacrifice is a form of worship, but it is only through
Mercy that we may show passion for what we believe.”

Coyote bites prevent carvings from going to Buxton’s General Store,
But what nature produces it also receives.
Ants forage along the split underbelly,
And a red-tailed hawk carries away the entrails.

History defines the antlers of deer as symbols of the Gods,
And men would wear them atop their heads.
I collect only them, still draped with threads of velvet,
Knowing that years from now, nestled inside the perimeter
Of wind-beaten fences around the family farm, beyond
Moss-covered slopes and the Wishing Rock,
Will be the bones of a solitary stag.

— after Melancholia



She’d have walked through fire for him —
A stranger with a fractured chameleon soul,
Tumultuous depths and misguided hymns,
But promises of patience and a steady stroll.

Stranger still, a fractured chameleon soul,
Restless beneath wind-tremors and silt-clay loam.
But with promises of patience and a steady stroll,
She follows the moon that leads her home

Restlessly. Wind tremors and silt-clay loam,
Burnt umber flicker-beats and faded birches.
She follows the moon, led home
To an abandoned, white-chip-painted church.

Beyond umber flicker-beats and faded birches,
He preached of salvation, but fell privy
Inside the abandoned, white-chip-painted church
Where green was gold and gold was envy.

He preached of salvation, but fell privy
To tumultuous depths and a misguided hymn.
Green was gold and gold was envy —
She’d have walked through fire for him.

You caress my palms, kissing the ridges of my knuckles
With the sweet tenderness of peaches hanging under the sun.
Your tongue is a river rock smoothed over
By torrents of stream-water, turned pink by the subtle heartbeat
Of escalating pulsations from thumb-tip to chest.
Your lips are the gentle puckering catfish upon my neck,
Tickling veins like spindle-legged crayfish.
Your eyes bore softly into mine like melting rivulets,
Blue-rushing, meeting a freckle of green and flecks of hazel,
Laid upon me like the blanket I had when I was three,
Teasing me like a feather flirting with grasses on the bank.
Your fingers embrace the small dip of my ankle, motionless against skin.
Your body is a poem, speaking louder than your tongue,
Forming sonnets with your spine and simple words, saying “I adore you.”

— for the American Mustang



Strung up on one leg, bled dry while alive,
unloaded off trailers crammed full
of the crippled and blind —mares
giving birth on three legs, foals trampled
by stallions, and a wave of fear
hovering over tossing manes
like the sea after Moby **** surfaced
for the first time. Last year,

135,000 horses died —

rounded up in hundreds and sent
off to slaughter like feeder goldfish,
three stops from Canada
or Cabo, displaced from plains
once revered for their livelihood.

In 1969, Vonnegut
wrote, “And so it goes…”

In 2061, our children will ask about the wild
horses who used to live in their backyards
as they catch the last fireflies and bottle
them up in jars, flickering and dying
like tired bulbs giving up on electricity —

2015 sees Henderson, Nevada grasses paying tribute
to power-plant-lines and a suburb built
on Tralfamadore fiction: house-mounds
and picket fences caging domesticated dogs,
curb-lined streets and caution signs, billboard
warnings of humanity’s fixation with progression,
combined like coffee with an overabundance
of half-and-half and too much sugar — only 99 cents
at Dunkin down a little ways, and home
to the dreamers who forget the word freedom.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
   —The Serenity Prayer

I. Heron

I was born arrow-straight, built for flying,
Three skipping stones past Otter Creek, hollow
Bones blanketed by slate gray, blue stones slight
And callused by well-worn prayers and shallow
Swells of minnows — subterranean aches —
And water cold on yellow scales, hardened
By the calamity of sunsets, lakes —
The drowning weight of too many pardons.
Dip low, tend this broken shoreline sweetly,
Spread shadowed wings and break honeyed silence.
Forgiveness take flight at dusk, discreetly
Written in psalms. Tepid soul find balance
Between the calm, a resting river space
This old trembling mind cannot displace.

II. Quetzal

After the storm, the chaos and quiet
Meet like dew poised on timid fingertips
And shallow grasses to quell the riot
Stirring inside. Fix fragments of this ship
Made of broken parts. My soul’s petrichor:
Inhale failure with a benediction
That fills tired lungs with bravery, before
Nature proposed expectations — fiction
Taut and mended by truth. The earth exhales
In breaths refreshed by rain, accompanied
By loudening trills and harmonious tales —
The tremor of circumstance, and the need
To continue existence like the weeds
That grow in sidewalks despite human greed.

III. The Pelican and the Gull

American Magicicadas choose
To surface seventeen years after birth
For the purpose of recreation. The Blue
Pelican cannot quietly unearth
The patterns of the tide without the gull,
But she does so with tireless trials
And the moon at her back — the lunar pull
Shaping stray shells for a little while.
Twenty-one years of tawny solitude
Shattered by innate desires, buried
Deep by stubborn aches, and kindly allude
To breathing for the first time. Weight carried
And lifted by rekindled hope, reaching
Sands like a button shell kissing the beach.

IV. Kingfisher

I pondered self-acceptance before diving
Into seas uncharted, with the patience
Of Tibetan monks softly harvesting
Grains of sand on an abandoned shore. Since
Emptiness is impermanence, we change
Like shifting seas suspended in nature,
Born from the crease of God’s hand — rearranged
Flaws bound by circumstance. Come close. Nurture
This silent heart into awakening.
Beyond these gray waters surges the sun,
Hopeful in the wake of a newfound spring,
Ochre and alizarin. We become —
Aware that no one saves us but ourselves,
With self-worth rising in tremendous swells.

******* me so I cannot follow
Your hopscotch stumble. Tie my laces
Around the oak by Allbrook Elementary, handcuff
My wrists to the swing set of mauve plastic
And chipped cedar. Tether me in youth.
Leave me at the fudge shop on 73rd

Across from Sunday school and St. Joseph’s
Candy Land windows. Hide me beneath
Tanner Bridge as you shuffle away like some star-struck Cupid
After a ginger-haired mademoiselle in old-fashioned Mary Jane’s
And a mustard petticoat. Forget
Our first clumsy kiss, feet naked in cool creek water,
Toes nibbled by baby rainbow trout.

Bury our history of 18 years
Beside the grave of your granddaddy and
Put on your mask. You've lost me
To ambitions set high above Stanford red.
You don’t see the colors of home anymore.

I fall in love with someone new every day,
Because there’s something about smiling at strangers --
Knowing their eyes and absolutely nothing else.

I love the low-hanging clouds over the mouth
Of the Amazon, that whisper to its banks stories
Of the low and high seasons, accompanied
By boat thrums and the kiddish squeals of pink dolphins
Playing in pairs near their wakes.

How the humidity carries a tropical air
Which floats through broad-leafed palms
To your senses as the water laughs in loose rolls –
Unfurling like an easy smile and revealing
Twenty-foot banks that disappear with the rain.

I’m not sure what’s more beautiful –
The entirety of it all or the glasslike meridian beads of water
That run away from the boat, warning dragonflies
And beetles that it doesn’t belong,
While from above a hawk screams to bedside reeds

And with a birdsong choir makes music of wind chimes
With the whistling of grasses and leaning trees,
Begging the mud to hold and refuse to succumb to the glean
Of two-legged greed and caustic tourism that turns
The river into a hungry swell.

A song about life and the nature of things --  
Pleading for blind eyes to change what they refuse to see,
To let the jungle alone to wild certainty,
Before humans tried to take what they cannot tame.

Catch my mooring rope
And come ashore with gentle tugs,
Sweetly, softly, nibble on my ear,
And run your fingers over my weathered sails.
Trace the notches on my docks,
For the places I’ve been –
Santorini last spring, Venezia,
Marseilles in the fall.
Get rid of the doubt that hangs
Like an albatross around your neck,
Capsizing fears sending tremors up my bows.
Simply breathe like the swelling tide,
And sing a sailor’s song,
The one about the Spanish ladies,
“For we will be jolly, and drown melancholy,
With a health to each jovial and true-hearted soul.”
Loosen my knots and we’ll drift out to sea,
Two travelers with one home.

I want to fold up Constantinople
And tuck it in the crease of my pocket
With a rock and a harlequin opal,
Nestled against your map of Nantucket —
A keepsake framed by a tired locket.

Sunlight pours past panes like gold tapestries,
Blue-sky-checkmates belonging to Vermeer
And his Woman with a Balance — trophies:
A man crowned a chivalrous cavalier,
A gentleman of this tremendous sphere

Misunderstood by societal norms,
And expectations set by precedent.
All while a bird coos cucurucu, warmed
By yellow light, freed from discontented
Murmurs with song. I want to read segments

Of the map on the curved back of your hand,
Knuckle-mounds like the knees of a woman
You once said you loved between shorthanded
Compliments and the words of Walt Whitman —
Blanketed by a bible and a man.

Maybe our web-tangled thoughts coexist
With the sky, place our feet firm on the ground.
Or maybe they’re a window that insists
On temptations, the mind, rewritten sounds,
Coming alive, and wanting to be found.

Sand-crusted catacombs of dismembered dreams
Settle beside memories of the child who grew up

In rocky Harpswell, Maine. Not many beaches,
Only a foggy stretch beyond Morse Mountain --

But I used to stand ankle-deep
In the water, wait until my toes sank

Into crystalized Earth
And bubbles from Littleneck clams.  

I’d stand there until goosebumps spread upon
My blanched legs, rising up, up, like the artificial hills

Of Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield.
Now, when I lie alone,

Misplaced inside a vacant Manhattan studio,
I surrender to sirens and accelerated lives.

Peace comes in painting – thick oil,
Violet and claret on stretched canvas,

Depictions of neon signs and cityscapes,
Cheap t-shirt stands on street corners,

And 24-hour coffee shops with “specialty”
Blends in little white travel mugs – selling

To flocks of strangers, strutting like pigeons on cement
Sidewalks, pretending they belong.

My heart is made of gold,
But my wings are made of paper,
Soft and delicate and prone to breaking.

She had a chameleon heart
And a wandering soul,
But there was a fire in her eyes
That refused to go out for anybody.

She thought she could feed
his fire on her own.

You are all the light
I have ever seen
And the poem
I have never
Been able to write.

I walked the cedar trails of Morse Mountain
Yesterday, solemn knowledge in my bones,
And blanketed grief beneath a certain
Old Slippery Elm. His branches reached stones
I used to throw with my father, before
Cancer stole from generations like leaves
Windswept while green, what we try to ignore.
Acceptance blooms like rubra flowers — ease
My troubled skin, and give me quiet hope
In the form of vibrant cardinal trills.
My spine turns to paper. Grand periscopes
Of things revealed as my brittle roots still:
Creation comes in cyclical stages —
What small joys will be made from my pages.

Take me to church in the sweet oceans of your eyes
And let me drink in the taste of you.
Because all that I am is who you are
And what you see in me.