About My Work
I’ve always been stumped by the question: What kind of poems do you write? I write the poems that ask to be written. I have been focused recently on poetry of witness, but then I see two hawks wheeling high above me, or I hear that a 23 year old woman who had been a seventh and eighth grader in my classroom dies, and I write a more personal poem. Whatever needs to be called out from the rooftops.
Poems
Reviewed In
Perseids
Each year in August their dust separates from its comet’s
orbit, and appears in our sky as swiftly moving light
but I haven’t seen them since I was fifteen years old,
lying on my back in a meadow, the crowded Vermont sky
spread out over my head. The city where I live now
cannot sleep in the dark: when I look northeast over the lake
I see only a few vague stars fixed in their place
and, back towards the city, Venus
undiminished by all our nightlights, lighted offices
alternating with offices left dark to spell the initials
of the city fire department, riding lights on yachts
at anchor, sodium oxide lamps lining the beach,
streetlights haloed in leaves, searchlights
rented to promote opening nights and spectacular
sales, or even the fireworks, miniaturized
by distance, that open as suddenly
as balloon flowers, the soft thuds of their detonation
reaching us after their sparks have already fallen
into the attentive water. And still Venus
rides above us, on the backs of invisible meteors.
as published in Two by Two, available from Finishing Line Press
