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Melt

ice recedes

the solid white

pocks, goes white to gray

gray to film to puddled

puddled to lace

between river rock bottom & ice top

a melt hole grows

a dark space shows

cold winter air

ice above, water below

silent ice loosens to chortling water

yellow pebbles

water-churned rocks & stones

melt hole joins melt hole

ice recedes

land wears no more snow

no more winter

river water as cold as ice

Wild Life

the river ice is half gone, a white

field punctured by dark holes

lace edged, daily longer & wider

thick slabs undercut with melt

shallow chuckling water ripples

over yellow stones, rubs & rives

at fallen trees, worn boulders

invisible fish, & newts, frog spawn

skims, & stopping to drink, a fisher

a bobcat, brown bear & deer,

raccoon & skunk, rabbit & mouse

turkey & grouse, all those whose

prints would name them, were

humans outdoors, but they’re not

turkeys

four wild turkeys

swashbuckle & bob

thru deep snow

where from? 

where to?

does a wild turkey

have a home base?

or is it move along

taste & see

& move along

settle here a while

a night 

& move along

Jan 13 2026

the two gray squirrels 

might be puppet strung

bound bound bound 

halt on two back feet

nose at ice-furred snow 

survey stubbled field

bound bound bound

Bristol Cliffs

driver door wide open, someone

piles bricks on the gas pedal, turns

the key, pops the clutch, & dives

sideways into dry dirt, gravel, weeds

while the car shoots forward & tips

down the slope, bounces off rocks

& carves divots in trees, whump

crackle, metal dimples & groans

another used-up ride the woods

kindly clothes & claims as its own

Minutiae

in one liminal patch

I find Morchella americana

twenty-two morels

such labyrinthine folds

& Arisaema triphyllum

a jack-in-the-pulpit

its folded-over hood still

hiding its striped interior

they emerge beside

dread invasives — garlic

mustard, dame’s rocket —

the few greens I’m willing

to pull, as if I ruled

this wild, this woods rim

where I heap cat litter

& tissues & egg shells

heaps I hide under

wood chips gleaned

from trees I’ve downed

without me these

two acres would soon

carpet my house

Small Sounds from the Kitchen

I listen three nights

when a creature

not one of the three of us

prowls the dark

until one morning

a scratch, a scrape

becomes my cat

carrying a mouse

the tail dangles

a white neck shines

the cat trots outside

my other cat follows

the end is a different story

Such Is

the burden of driving the hundred miles

to visit friends or family, to consult on a project 

— that length of time, those dangerous roads — 

so one stays home, looks out the same windows

onto the same trees, grass, driveway, road

yet what comfort the known brings, the one mug

filled with the favorite tea . . . I am most at risk

between five & seven am, the time when I wake

& make tea & read headlines reporting the latest

obscenities — South Carolina executes a man

by firing squad, Israel kills 87 Palestinians

our dumb fuck president spews nonsense

enables morons, deports & kills people — 

yet the day begins, I divert myself, Homer

diverts me, my ignorance consoles me

1964

the morning after my high school graduation

a moving van pulls up out front

of our New Jersey house

                                             United! it proclaims

& while movers maneuver

the contents of our house down the walk

up the ramp into the dark tunnel

                                                         stacked with blankets

                                                         strung with belts

& while my mother supervises

the know-it-all yes’m no’m blue-jumpsuited crew

I assemble a collection

of what I might need for the rest of my life

                                                                           I’m seventeen

& I’m not moving to DC though she thinks I am

no, today is I win (& lose), game over

get out, get out for good

drive away in my two-door pale-blue Pontiac

                                                                               dressed in black

& strung with pearls, it takes her

six weeks to find me cleaning a toilet in a stranger’s house

no, I won’t come with you, won’t pretend

you have any hold over me, won’t endure

one more day of your husband’s (my father’s) 

drug- & drink-addled rage

                                             she drives off

I pass another night deep in the park, locked in my car

End Game

yes, we too suffer while we

watch & tend to the old & ill

tend them when they know

& we know it’s end game

they tremble, dribble, moan

embarrass & soil themselves

still, we don’t deliver the dose

are we making them pay

for what they’ve done to us?

only nature or some kinder god

grants them their release

later we advertise how long

we forced them to endure

Paradiso Anagrams to Diaspora

I am in paradise

not banished but instead

where I would most wish to be

because of fragments

I live outside the outer world

inside my own world

though I don’t knit

I’m knitting . . . long ago I wove

my body my loom

Silk

the sussuration of S

iffiness of a short I

strength & resilience of an L

scissor snip of a K

silk blouses always

pretending to slide off my shoulders

silk blouses & trousers

I gave away

when I threw off the salaryman slog

& moved to Hawaii

off grid, forty acres of rainforest

rain, mud, feral pigs

rooting outside my windows

the four-thousand meters of silk

inside every silk moth cocoon

What It's Like to Fall @ 77 Years Old

I am hallucinating the out of doors

because I am inside until further notice

every window in my house brings me

light, bare trees, snow on the ground

indoors is this ugly aluminum walker

in my lap a book about taking the walks

Henry David Thoreau took . . . Cape Cod

Mt Katahdin, Mt Wachusett . . . nearly

two centuries ago people truly walked

New England out of doors was country

from here to there & yet a farther there

as far as one might walk in a day, a week

a month . . . one day I might be back up

on both of my feet & out of doors

US Public High School, 2025

she tells me about a boy who comes to school

filthy — clothes, skin, hair — I mean filthy, she says

I wonder, does he never wash? has he no shower?

no parents? no home? what brings him to school

every day? he’s one of six students in her

“intervention” group, students who are behind

who do not learn, who cannot, she says, learn

the parts of speech, though all of them can speak

they know how to assemble verb, noun, adjective

so in fact they know parts of speech as a dog

knows a hydrant, a cat, its owner, without

giving names to any of them — a dirty silent

boy, who agrees to sit at the group table the day

another boy, the one who misbehaves, is absent

Air

every Palestinian child killed

is someone I will never know

you might say

I wouldn’t know them anyway

because before they’d have grown

I’ll have died, & yet

we might have exchanged

fleeting gusts of air, theirs

blown here from Rafah in Gaza, mine

blown there from small town Vermont

they bombed into fragments

picked off by snipers

skin & bones in a mother’s arms

while I slow & slip & sink

& succumb to old age

every you & I, we are the same