January 2025
Bio Note: My poems are collected in my books Signs of Marriage, Mother, One More Thing, and Intimacy with the Wind. I’m an avid cyclist, long-distance swimmer, paddleboarder, nordic skier, hiker, and gardener, whose poem, “Pat Schroeder was our Mother” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.
The MIstake of Cutting Down
I was mistaken I didn’t care for the pine trees that bordered my yard —
The needle-pissers
The sap-cryers
The sun-sponges
The temples of shade
I was mistaken that cutting down trees
would be nothing more than an even exchange
of dollars for work.
I was mistaken my neighbor didn’t care when he said so,
mistaken I understood my neighbor understood
what I didn’t know I didn’t understand.
I was mistaken I would not quiver with each thud and thunder,
mistaken my backyard was not a spring,
rather, a sponge that would not recoil from the trauma of heavy machines.
I accepted a sparse cover
of seed and loam for the future promise of a recovered lawn.
Was that a mistake too?
I was mistaken not to consider the birds,
mistaken I hated squirrels.
I was mistaken a man with ropes on a limb was exciting,
the felling of trees, not violent.
Originally published in Intimacy with the Wind, Finishing Line Press, 2017.
The Mesh of Root
When I garden it’s like when I write—
I grab seeds leftover from last season or earlier,
stuff dried peas into the soil, unfed for years,
infested with grass seed, knotted with roots—
clover, weeds, grubs eating through it all.
I’d plunge a hand in to tug at the grass,
so ingrown I could barely untangle the mess.
I don’t attempt to tame any of it, leaving
the outcome to chance. Still I punch
in seeds of radish, lettuce, tulsi, bean,
and even single starts of tomato and cuke.
Then I leave it all on a timer and go away.
This year in my garden, only two crops
of pea vines greened up, two feet high,
until the grubs cut in.
But what’s the point? The plants brown up
the vine even before flowering. Still
this doesn’t stop me from planting more
peas in October, even hoping for green.
Look, there, in the corner, woody-stemmed,
and burnished with autumn, one sole mustard plant
I had hoped, too, would flower and seed,
but instead I pull off one of its few leaves,
and bite in—a tang, rich and deep—
enough to satisfy, but not to feed.
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