power plant plumes

dead broomsedge hissing
in the ridgetop wind

The sun is different here—

distant, keeps odd hours. A foreigner, regarded with a mixture of bemused tolerance and mistrust.

another year gone

the traditional sauerkraut
salty as tears

college town

even the old motel
is younger than me

In a dream, I ask advice on raising children

and am told to bury them in the yard so they’ll ripen.

I dreamed a giant silk moth fluttered into a museum

and joined its life-like relatives on the wall.

I place myself

on the Underground map uneasily, wondering how such ideal points and lines can add up to anything resembling the surface.

Bronze Age

I dreamed myself adrift in a forest of the dead.

bronze Gandhi

patina sending tendrils
toward the earth

What is it that we are missing

between footfalls, in a caught breath? What tic or tick of rhetoric makes the ground so unsolid wherever we are told we must mind the gap?

Christmas in July

the half-dozen hues
of dead needles

cloudy Sabbath

all eyes are on the bright
heirloom tomatoes