New Blog, New Poem

I was going to blog tonight but fear I expended my energy on this poem:


With My Dog in the Rain

Deer paths, thin passages
of hoof-flattened grass

sometimes widen into creeks
dividing the high brush

by which we follow, the dog
running circles around my

plodding subsidy to his energy,
down the slope to the stream,

riparian gully of sword ferns
and stunted birches with puffs

of pale lime moss. Follow to cliff
where water threads over,

carving through sand to surf.
Swells lift the ocean

in a parade of salt explosions
liquid tons thundering

against the jagged implacable
wall of sea-resisting rock

though wilting in time, soon gravel.
One cold rain drop splits my forehead

like chilled mercury, slips
between my eyebrows, sobers.


Meanwhile I continue to labor in the promotion of my book (see panels above) like a voice crying in the wilderness, subsisting on locusts and honey, like Atlas shouldering the world, like Sisyphus dueling the boulder up and down the hill. It is, btw, for your convenience, now available in paperback at Amazon.com.

How they are able to offer it so cheaply and so soon I have no idea. But the hardback is a better deal, which you can find at Diminuendo Press.

Just because I've had a complete work published does not mean that I'm over poetry and have quit writing it. Quite the contrary, the closure of the book has released me to write more freely than ever, as this rough draft above may demonstrate. I suppose I will always be at heart a Nature poet, and I make no apologies about it. My relationship to the urban has always been to seek the triumph of the natural within it, as in polished beach glass born of littering or dandelions blooming in asphalt cracks, hawks nesting in glass towers. Here's a short example:


Found Park

Downtown in a paved lot
ringed by sagging chain-link
I found a dandelion forest
where purple stalks
over six feet tall
sprouted from asphalt ridges
roots buckled for the sun.
There wasn't a trace of dirt.

Their white seed filaments
looked tightly bunched
inside green trumpets
unlike the silver
hundred-legged spiders
that hover over lawns.
Their flowers were deeper yellow,
smaller and thicker,
plentiful as stars.


(published in Terrain)


In any case, the carved wooden Indonesian frog doctor on my desk advises me, with his hooded eye, that it is past my bedtime. So be it.


1 Kilobunny,

CE