A native of Johnstown, NY, I retired in June 2016 after 29 years of teaching writing and literature at Ripon College in Wisconsin.  I've published six collections of poetry, including Stutter Monk and Second Wind; I also co-edited (with Kate Sontag) the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Confession.  Essays, reviews, and individual poems have appeared widely, both in print and online.  In recent years I've spent nearly as much time on photography as poetry.  A gallery of my work is online here: http://instagram.com/doctorjazz​​

My Father, Never Late for Anything in Life, Finally Slows


If there were heaven this would be 
limbo:  he's puttering through 
the kitchen making noise—not in anger 
or joy, just a trifle klutzy with the toaster, 
knocking against a chair, struggling
to unstick a sweet jar lid.  

He's early, as always, still
a little too soon for leaving,
so he shuffles around 
putting magazines in squared piles,
sorting through the junk drawer,
testing several pens for ink.

Soon he will sweep the car keys
with a sigh from their nail,
then pat his hip pocket twice
for the bulge of wallet, and finally
swing wide the door,
letting in a swoop of winter air

then fumbling with the dog,
who escapes between his legs,
a scene that might be funny 
if he smiled.  By the time he retrieves
the pup and is ready again to go,
he is no longer early at all.





Johnstown By Smell


Like salmon thrashing up the hatching stream, most nights
I swim from the vast Atlantic of the present up the Hudson,
then west along the Mohawk River & Barge Canal from Albany,
doing it all by smell, till at Fonda I nose into the diluted scent 

of tannery waste up the Cayadutta Creek, through rolling hills, 
cornfields and pasturelands past Sammonsville to Johnstown 
at last, where the water begins to look right, creek yellow 
or red depending on daily dyes spewing from glove mill pipes 

into the shallow, slate-bottomed waters that spawned me 
a half century and more ago, before the mills closed
or moved to Asia, leaving their firetrap hulks to give off
the sweet smell of decay in August sun, and no more hot scent

of curing deer hide, scraped gobs of flesh getting in your nose
lifelong, before the glue factory boiled it all down, stinking up
the whole north end of town, smell worse than chickenshit
or hog yards, mixing, yes, with poultry and pig on the breeze

and the ferment of silos piled with corn husks, tinged as well
with textile dust drifting from Johnstown Knitting Mill,
then donut grease from Smitty's, and the ripe sauce of condoms
still warm in storm drains, then distant, pine-sharp whiffs

of the long-settled graveyard, where family names still bloom
stubborn as dandelions, and the bitter salad smell of crabgrass
and charcoal fluid, mulchy odors of leafmat left and buried
in a vacant lot fifty years ago, a ranch house now rising

on the spot of those vanished weeds where John and Rusty 
and Lyle and Mark and I ran bases summerlong, a season
I can hear and see and taste, yes, but mostly smell in the wind 
swirling my curtains now well past midnight, on the downward 

slope I guess of my ramble home, through buzzing fields of
timothy, down at last to a fire pond before a farm that is 
no longer a farm, cattails and arrowhead, water so bottomless 
with night it won't even give back the pinprick solace of starlight.