Two kids, two cars, careers. Too much, sometimes. I wanted poplar green, but you held fast. Now when the sun crowns the corrugated fields above our home, it coats the room with streams…

Toilet, Faucet, Refrigerator, Squeaking limbs, Slap of the cat door, Whippoorwill’s chant, Dust raining onto dresser tops, Warm air tickling heating vents, Moon light skidding down louvered blinds, An edged plea dodging round the bedroom door, “Daddy, I’m scared…

Age 68 — uninterrupted sleep an ancient scroll, last week I woke up at two AM, breath racing from running up three flights of stairs to avoid the spectral tsunami soaking floors one and two, looking down at the havoc outside, cars swirling like small pieces of kelp tossed by…

When some new thing opens my eyes I’m a sapling planted in rich, warm black soil — a granite pebble dropped into a pond thirty feet deep, falling faster and faster (I know — gravity doesn’t work that way), except suddenly, I need to own every book or piece of equipment for my new hobby — beginner to advanced…

The January thaw fools us all, merely land’s false labor and spotting, because a full-term spring gestates until April — precocious ones late March — when Sol’s cleansing finally dissolves winter’s ivory caul. Streamside in the hollers, the thaw reveals both Jacob and Esau — tea green buds and last…

1. Lauds A nightmare wakes me — repeated theme — I can’t get to Barajas, the Madrid airport — I will miss my plane — but the subtext is “go to the damn bathroom” — so I throw back the percale sheet, roll to the right, and plant my slightly…

The Color-Field painters: Rothko, Still & Newman, birthed abstract shapes — squares, fat lines, splotches like dripped candle wax — colors that contrast & compliment. Creative lust is satisfied by many…

If the world hadn’t called me away — injecting knowledge and career, I’d be with you now, resting quietly on your trunk, tranquility rolling over my limbs — a salving fog — do others feel your emanations or is it all just ether from my lungs? In my beach year…

About twenty years ago, I had a girlfriend in LA, who became my first love, though not the woman I have loved the most. We did all the first love things, the moist loins thing, the lying to parents overnight trip thing, the matching rings thing, the everlasting devotion thing, the break up every 6…