On the eve of the winter solstice and the cosmic illusion of the “Christmas Star” that Jupiter and Saturn will provide this week, I went back to a poem I wrote a couple of years ago that found new life this year, thanks to my friend, composer Taylor Scott Davis, who used an adaptation of…

weather report my father once told me I should become a weather forecaster “you can be wrong everyday and you’ll never get fired’ it’s going to snow all night six to twenty inches they say a reminder that we’re all guessing when it comes to the weather by morning the snow will be deeper than…

After a long day, I have been staring at the screen and writing down dead end streets to the point that I have circled back to an old poem of mine that showed up in a memory today. I need to sleep, so I am going to lean into to your grace and offer words…

sundown our oldest dog Ella has taken to fits of barking at night doggie sundowning the vet says sometimes I can tell what she wants she barks at the food closet or she stares at the kitchen counter at other times things aren’t so clear her bark a barbaric yawp an existential cry of angst…

unsustainable the first restaurant where I worked was a disaster from the start the owner had dreamed of a tea house but had no idea how to run one we closed on a Tuesday without any warning we should have seen it since the dining room never filled with people but we kept cooking after…

“Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.” –David Whyte, Consolations accounting for non-business majors we never pay inattention the cost of ignoring (ignorance?) requires a different accounting but I never could balance my checkbook, so I’m not the one to keep the ledger other than to say life is going to cost…

Somedays I come to this page with something to say already in mind, as if to make an offering. Sometimes I come with nothing but raw feelings, almost like a confession or simply a statement of how things are. Tonight is the latter. Thanks for meeting me here. tired the word exhaust means to empty…

winded it’s not just stacking the wood you have to cover it–I know that it doesn’t sound hard, does it I walked down to Page’s and bought a tarp, blue and brown and a pack of bungee cords the first time I centered the tarp and folded in the edges like I was gift-wrapping and…

insulatus I don’t have time to tell you the whole story, but I spent a week in St. Petersburg it was Leningrad then a perfect graduation gift for a Russian history major the center of the city was a collection of islands connected by drawbridges we didn’t really notice until we were out late in…