I found this suitcase slumped in a dark attic corner like a drunk awash in self- pity. I was Me once. There’s a burn mark beside one latch. I tell myself, with a bit of wonder, Me used to smoke in those days. Indeed– and drink. And booze and bright ash equaled char, perhaps in […]
The following essay is from my forthcoming collection, The Music of What Happens, a compendium of newspaper articles I wrote as Vermont Poet Laureat (2011-2015): People have often asked me, of course, why I chose poetry as my principal vocation. I like to joke that it’s all about money, women, and fame . . . […]
Fats and Little Richard would come to our rescue, but before they did I ached for Patti Page, “The Singin’ Rage,” as the radio deejays dubbed her. I remember loving “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?” And “Mockingbird Hill”– maybe corny, yet it robbed my breath. In her much older age, that star […]
Hank Nicci worked as the gas pump man at Greville’s Sunoco all that summer. He had a heart like a Valentine, but softball-sized, tattooed on a shoulder. It said Mom. What else would it say in those times? His bleach-blond girlfriend looked like a star right out of the movies, at least in my eyes. […]
…the only sensible impression left is, “I am nothing!” –Coleridge Farmwives conjure elaborate quilts. Woodworkers busy themselves at their stations. No shortage at all of craftspeople here, but however deft these artisans, their work’s no balm for my sudden unease. Today I’ve sampled maple balls and poutine, and from a provisory bleacher, heard the roars […]
I sometimes come on headstones in backwoods graveyards girt by their own shallow graves the size of bathtubs and by brush, through which each one juts valiantly upward. Lately, whenever I take to my local river, small cavities in either side’s high sand tiers look empty to me as those graves must be by now. […]
In the pre-op room, my wife was given a scalene block for a brief procedure. She had shoulder surgery three months back, and now again they’ll anesthetize her to break up scars that have kept her in pain. She’ll be comatose, however briefly. I remembered right off how one’s love can seldom appear so precious […]
Some are apt to swoon over nature, loving what they call harmony. But Tennyson got it right on whoever Trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law, saying Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed. The gulls that once patrolled the Bay of Naples, for instance, long since […]
In a characteristically compelling essay called “Grub: A Man in the Market,”1 Garret Keizer briefly muses on his distaste for upper New England farmers’ markets. He concedes that those institutions appeal to what his wife Kathy calls “our tribe.” That’s the tribe, I suppose, one might equally associate with me and my own wife, yet […]
At dawn today, the fog still slept on the river. The sun of a seemingly endless, Hadean heat wave had not yet broken through, so I drove to the launch for a paddle. Green herons, smart as sentries, patrolled one bank. A beaver sculled beside me, blasé, for a full forty yards, peeled branches bright […]