October 2024
Bio Note: Now that I'm not teaching anymore, I can fully enjoy my favorite season, fall, which has happily become an extension of summer! Retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, I write, hike, and cycle with my psychotherapist wife in and around the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. My latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020).
Leaf Fall
Asymmetric chandeliers instigate
their rhapsodic drop, the ruddling scumble-
trove of falling leaves and epiphanies
whose sillage shellacs paw, pelt, and breezes.
Trapezes sling these acrobatic hues
into bold arcs, risky spins, pronounced turns
before alights the wind-borne troupe of the
trees. Stippled bark akin to camo backs
the show, and cursive limbs announce the new
season: caesura ending summer’s song.
Originally published in Escape into Life.
Second Day of Gun Season
and they’ve already bagged
some ninety-odd bucks.
A fine-looking local,
camo hat jaunty
over jostled blond hair, his
bolt-action Winchester coddled
between twin olive-green sleeves,
poses, grinning, on the front page—
a ten-pointer (if I know how
to count it right). Me,
I’ve posted warnings,
canceled all maneuvers,
withheld any and all furloughs,
mandated all my dears
close ranks at home-base
for the duration.
Down the Stretch
late August:
sad leftovers of once-orange
day lilies. Half-
browned fronds fall, cross-
hatch, amass
their quickly declining
piling. But
from the entry-way window,
I can see again
that runt hosta! It’s baring
its buried leaves,
flaunting the flaxen beige
of its variegated
edging, waving its fading
purple pennants
into the post-season.
Originally published in Muddy River Poetry Review.
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