Poem Gallery

My mother practiced photography the way I practice poetry, developing images in a darkroom under a safety light. I spent happy hours with her there.

A poem written from the place where poetry lives. That is, foot by foot, line by line—the way we drive at night: seeing only thirty feet ahead. 

One of the surprises of age, watching as things you thought permanent suddenly reveal their true, transient nature. 

My sister has been giving me a crash course in film; we have focused on Thirties and Forties movies I missed out on. 

I have indeed journeyed back to that country I called Violin—twice exiled, now yet again returned—and found myself mixing my arts, that is, using my poetry to map that journey after the fact. Mostly it's felt joyous, with quiet acknowledgement of the rough spots on the road. I find myself grateful for the maturity that's allowing me to see them that way: quietly. 

On a friend's recommendation, I've been listening to a recording of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant. One of its themes is the loss of memories—and the possible loss of memory itself. Now in my seventies, I have had my own glimpses of what that means. I write in the dark; I have to remember rhymes and rhythms and turns—and possible points of return. This poem shines its light on what would happen

I had the good fortune to begin violin lessons at nine; classical music has been part of my life since. I let it go in my twenties, then was doubly fortunate to take it up again in my forties. This poem contemplates what it might mean to return to it yet again, in my seventies.

A poem about my long-time love, and lover, the sonnet. 

Recently, I found myself feeling wrong—yet again. So I went to my oracle—my poetry—and asked, How can I let this go? As has happened now for forty years, I got an answer.

Two lovers leaving—alliteratively, with a tentative evocation of a certain pun in the last line. 

Science, too, has its miracles. The fact that we're here at all; the facts of galaxies and molecules, structures vast beyond our comprehension and structures small beyond our sight; the fact that our bodies are built of star dust. And the fact that all life seems descended from a single source, from fruit fly to elephant, from minnow to blue whale, from the first eukaryote to us. 

From whatever vantage point we look at something, from another it changes, and from yet another, it reveals yet another version of itself. All true? All false? Plato posited a world of forms—but we need more than that, we need “the thing itself.” I myself live in the world of sonnet form, yet any one iteration of that form must “take sides,” must—manifest. Yet in the end, no one version is truer t

A poem from that receding landscape, the winter of Covid. I sleep in what my sister calls her “cabin accomodation,”  a pool house redone in warm wood by loving hands. Every Tuesday morning, I can hear the neighborhood garbage trucks swarming by. Here's a piece for those essential workers who kept going regardless. 

Some say the sheer number of seemingly habitable exoplanets mandates other intelligent life, other civilizations. Something in me insists otherwise. This poem arises out of that inner conviction. Trying to make sense of it, I fall back on how, on a planet teeming with life, we are a single, and singular, species: out of many, one. Extrapolating from that one perhaps telling data point, I will clai

I read an article recently about a spate of deaths from sneaker waves all along the California coast. Ironically, viewing a new ocean from the distant heights of the Andes, Pizarro called it the Pacific; those who come closer see another side. It does, after all, cover half the planet, and often does not yield lightly to land. 

A sonnet that starts on the most mundane of surfaces—washing dishes—and, I like to think, dives deep, capturing, perhaps, the interplay between large and small, state and town, world and planet—and finally, a force behind it all, her father's love, and her own. 

Twice a year, my brother makes a happy road trip out of commuting between Oregon and New Mexico. As a life-long railroad buff, and intrepid adventurer, he takes back roads off the back roads, following history as well as geography, especially when the railroads are part of that history. He recently made the trip north once again; this poem comes out of my following him, in imagination. 

Once again, envelope rhymes, repeating even (“way/ways,” “played/played”). Then the third stanza, or tercet, gets quite carried away with extra rhymes—just to fool the ear and distract from the double structural rhymes (“slowly/know he”). The last rhyme, as is often happily the case, was a gift: the rhyme on “to” was waiting for me in the poem, and let me bring a strong phrase back.

A meditation on memory—whose final phrase merges song and singer, poem and memory. 

A study in the power of alliteration. This poem started with my lips loving “we wade,” a love I chose to honor throughout the poem: “windy,” “we watch,” “we walk away.” The yellow highlighting shows other alliterations: “beached boat,” “bleached bones abandoned by.” And I have a theory: we love alliteration to the extent it recapitulates our love of learning language itself, as infants.

I've also