Lost Lands
    a word is elegy to what it signifies — 
                                  -Robert Hass

The thinking, old and new, is still about loss— 
so many pages filled with decaying Edens:
places where poets, lovers, thoughtful people,
made the old mistake of going back:
Tintern Abbey, blousy with candy wrappers;
Fern Hill faded from carefree green to mud;
New Brunswick woods, crossed by nocturnal buses,
but never bringing forth from scratchy shadows
that perfect, ambling moose, high as a church— 
Bishop’s sad-faced harbinger of joy.

Yet even knowing this, I enter the gash
in the chalky hills, try to rekindle the past
with steps that slide on trampled, grubby grass
and search again for my body’s imprint, stretched
deep in daisies, purple clover holding 
the shape of someone young, someone flat 
on her back, gazing past small brown bees,
the sky smudged with wavering vapor trails
of planes headed south where I always wanted to go. 
The word is honeysuckle; the life was sweet. 

-first published in Lost Lands (chapbook) Seven Kitchens Press



​Shopping for Death


We are searching for a spark
between the living and the dead— 
something that might ignite near the carved name
that waits for a visitor,
one who perhaps has nothing left to say.

We are searching for a plot to buy—a plot
where the spark might catch
when one of us lies down there, bones intact
or maybe just a heap of ash—a flash
of recognition when the other appears

holding a flower from our garden
or a bowl of raspberries the dead one
is too dead to enjoy—eyes too empty 
to appreciate the scarlet fruit
she once picked each morning before breakfast.

    I imagine myself the buried one.
    I imagine myself the visitor.

Visitor is easier to conjure
though more painful—loss being
an ache in the living body, an ache
I’ve felt before, whereas being the dead one
is unfathomable. Nothing at all like sleep.

Here is an available plot. A tree looms nearby.
Neighbors to the south, a close couple,
but somehow I don’t warm to it

as if house hunting on a street that fails to call out:
die here or lie here or wait here for someone to visit.

We are searching for a spark between the living 
and the soon-to-be dead: one above, the other below 
though we don’t know which is which, don’t know
upright from prone or what it will be like down there.
What if I should ask: can I try it on for size?

-first published in The Conversation (Salmon Poetry c. 2015)



The Engineer


My father kept charts, marked journeys on Michelin maps,
crayoned colored columns of various heights
on the graph paper he taped to the garage wall.

Oil changes, spark plugs, tire rotations, but no 
stories to match the maintenance: no reminiscing
about roads whose hairpin bends were ribbons

looped around the steep flanks of Swiss mountains,
their furious drop-offs waiting to be fed
by careless cars—never ours of course.

Spark-plug gaps were recorded in decimal points
and dark blue Parker Quink that faded over time
like old-fashioned ledgers, the credits and debits

of family vacations never discussed, not even when
his fourteen-month-old Vauxhall skidded to a stop
beside the French road so I could throw up my 

prix-fixe three course déjeuner and, later on, the French 
snack my mother thought would settle my stomach.
His stories were wordless: documents, photographs, 

and 8 millimeter movies that jumped and trembled
as he shot scene after scene through the windshield 
on a rutted road, never turning his lens to the side

where big white cows were as foreign as
the routier where we stopped for lunch 
and I vomited into a foreign ditch yet again.

I looked for a hidden message when those frames 
shuddered through the sprockets of his projector 
but for him it was story enough to show a spotless car

with its perfect spark-plugs carrying the family
safely over passes, or to add up the miles on the map
proving yet again his daily calculations right on target.

Now, though, I wonder what went on inside his head
when he looked up at the façade of Chartres Cathedral— 
Load bearing? Acid rain on stone? He never said.

from The Conversation (Salmon Poetry, c. 2015)