Barnes and Noble now carries my latest poetry collection, Stone Bird. The Fredericksburg VA store stocks two other titles. If you are thinking of buying at any of their stores, please do so and/or ask for this title so they may stock it in the future.
You may also order it online.
Red Clay Sunrise:
Reflections on a Year in Lead VA
This Yankee come-here,
Virginian by opportunity and choice,
met the mountain singers
and the city music-makers,
met the unvoiced despair
of poor hope in Richmond streets
and in shacks along hillside hollers,
saw the new ships building
in harbors where old
ships once brought crazy hoping
hungry pioneers up
the James River towards
Jefferson’s westward vision,
Declaration of rising sunsets,
met the patriots who
fought their own chains while
forging black hands to harsh fields,
met the new wayfarers
in Reston and Richmond,
building business from
nothing and hard ideas,
remet the American birthplace
of Virginian legacies,
and found this place of
red soil and lost tobacco
still ready for the passion of plows,
new order in a new land
where many hands can
still make Good Work
with our one Common Weal.
I’ve posted some exerpts from my poetry reading in fall of 2007 on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDy75A1OW-A
We Almost Caught the Turning
We had the time
to motion a part of the edge
to stop its wriggling.
Obeying, it ceased,
and the beginning was that edge.
We took a quasar’s pulse
and wondered if it would live.
There was the question of life at all,
until we discovered ourselves.
Beside a nightstand,
the unabridged prayerbook
opened itself to an astronomical page
when the six numbers parted
a red season.
We almost caught the turning.
Then the pulse quickened, faded,
and the edge reappeared, unopened again.
Published in Great River Review (1978)
He Reconciles The Scientist And Poet
Bent on quarks and omega mini,
eyed by the cosmic bits
that you eye on a photoplate
[spy into infinity),
you might deceive yourself
Breaking worlds into worlds,
banging clocks together
in infernal time till
the gears spill
like guts in streaks of white,
you might spy yourself
peering back; or
spin a beam
around the rim of universe
and see the back of your own head
bent over a retreating horizon.
Backed inside the whirling particles,
you watch your watching in a gas darkly.
Each time you break
something, it only makes something,
and the journey spills your guts
like gears,
and tells you stories
in different words.
You might receive yourself
coming back another way.
Published in Great River Review (1978)
Don’t Go Near The Edge
Staggering butterflies blind.
Dangerous skytraced motions
twist the mortician eyes loose
from their instaring;
the world takes on fluttering.
Don’t go near the edge.
You might fall, freefall like your dreamself
to a bedspring jingling conclusion.
“Don’t go near the edge,”
the voices monkey chatter
from the repetitious windows
in the samed in concrete structures
in the same and concrete words:
“Creations create…
Don’t go near the edge.”
But those damn staggering butterlifes,
nightdeepdiving skybirds after them,
sunset pinking the whole whorl with confusion.
Dangerous: you might see your blood
in the red mudpuddle,
might find your eyes on the wingcolors
of a moth.
Don’t go near them.
Even night’s not safe.
Moths bound around streetlights.
We hire yellow bulbs to keep them away.
The crazy white madness tempts.
Don’t go near them. They’ll edge you further
into the meaningless plan.
They’ll edge you into yourself’s selves.
They throw their lives into hot deaths
for the sake of the planned fall
fluff to the ground.
Trapped, you’ll hear them
scream
and explode in a dust cloud,
near the edge:
will you recognize in the wingwilt
of the downed mothcorpse of morning
the exhaustion of the saint. . . ?
Or plot the crazed course
of the worldmad wings
on quadruled paper?
You have both eyes.
Don’t go near the edge.
You’re playing with your life.
Published in Great River Review (1978)
In dreams I float like Edward White
who died in fire, but only after
he had lost himself in free fall.
Get back inside, they had to tell him.
He drifted at the end of an umbilicus,
his eyes enchanted by the blackest
shadows, the purest specks for stars,
and the awe of blue and swirls of clouds
from the round place that used to be
his home. Get back inside, they say,
but I drift in my dream above
their voices, filled with the blue
and swirling clouds. And in a sudden
burst, too near the sun, I flame.
Published in Piedmont Literary Review Summer 1987
Hungry inside, my father eats
his way out of my flesh.
When he is free of me,
all that is left of him within
is a rough, brown scab,
like a surgeon’s wound,
along the left of my abdomen.
Hungry outside, my father tries
to cut back in. He cannot.
Beneath the scab, the scar is pale,
lifeless, but firm and tough.
It lets nothing back within‑‑‑
his hunger unable to do more
than scratch at my flesh.
I love him as I love each wound‑‑‑
They are so hungry
to be still inside me.
But I remove him from my flesh
as I remove the scab,
stand back, admire the whitened scar,
paled, nerveless, hardened.
Sometimes there is a little blood.
Published in The Blue Unicorn Fall 1987
On The Pavement
The only monument
to the careening weep of car
was bled in black on pavement.
It washes in the warm rainshower,
glistening streetgrease;
it will leave no pain, no
remembering in the street.
Streets forget no more than remember.
Streets simply never sense
the images they might forget, recall,
or distort. The faces of streets
soon take their character
from the things they wear,
in black tar, in rubber remnants,
in the sprinkle of glass
flickering in mobile streetlight.
So the consuming crunch of car
body in red paint against the wall
is rouge for a dark face.
Streets wear the makeup mute,
and protest only to the jackhammer.
Published in Great River Review (1978)
Trout— rainbow; bass— small or large
mouth; pike, walleye, and bluegill;
he fishes them all from their water
in or out of season. He stands above
them on the dock, at the shore,
careful that the sun not shadow him
across early water. He baits hooks,
selects lures. He wades into running
streams with hand-woven flies and casts
loops of line into the very spot
where the trout mouths bubbles, waiting.
He walks on ice, cuts two holes,
drops a tripline into each and waits
in winter winds for a bell to ring,
signaling. And when the fish is beached,
panting on the sand, pulled into the boat,
netted from the stream, lying on the ice,
he slips the steel loop through its gills,
out its lipless mouth, and snaps it shut.
In every season, under any sky,
he passionlessly pulls fish from
their water, locks them by the gills,
and lets them down in the clear air
he himself must breathe. He may admire
the silvered flesh, the arc into the air,
the splash of red-stained water at sunset,
the tug of line, the whiz of reel,
the fight of fish into the straining net.
But— pike or trout, bass or salmon,
muskie, perch or bluegill— he pans
them all like gold from the rushing
of water. He pans them all in butter
above the snapping fire. He builds
his flesh from the meat of fish
dragged stupid but magnificent from
the cool dark shallows. He touches
the hook to his thumb, brings out a bead
of red, and tastes fish blood in his.
Published in Great River Review Fall 1987