“The long shadow” [Revised 10.21.2013] How many days will I have until he is not a boy anymore? How many days until he asks me questions I cannot answer? Or if I can answer them will I have strength, or the wherewithal, or the desire to respond as a father should, as a father might … More There are #poems that hurt to revisit. But I revisit them to grow.
I’ve gotten to spend some time with this poem over the last few days. Its simplicity spends time with me. What is beneath? What is above? And then I wonder – as I am who I am – what is falling in love like as an otter? Probably nothing at all. As social as they … More Otters again
“Otters” Dive with the leopard sharks in the kelp off of Monterey, frolicking between pillars of light in green waters thriving with leavesheaving inthe tide. Silky threads of sea lion bodies weave beneath our resting eyes, our yawns, our backs on the waves, noses thick with brine,hopeful bodies onthe tide
There are days when the piece of the world you are in wakes you up. Over the last couple of years, Standing Stone Creek has been that place. It runs through one of a couple of pieces of old growth forest in Pennsylvania. There, hemlocks nearly 1,000 years old thrive. Outside of the Pacific Northwest, … More Sometimes in Standing Stone Creek
“Lovers” I just found a hickory and a maple,trunks grown together, conjoined as lovers at their hips,tension free from their backs while the hands of their roots clutch their subterranean buttocks for decades of loamy passion.For centuries they have thrived while performing the rites of the living.I see them, old beings beaming their smiles at the … More The conjoined trunks of trees remind me of being a lover
“A Pile of Bricks” Jimmy dumped bricks three feet from the garden’s black cherry gate.A haphazard pile like the tires burned on SR 3012 where the gray-coated mangy mutt barks when I glide by on my single speed. And not. It was slated to become a tiny wall for a fecund bed of nose-twisting garlic, a ring … More A pile of bricks is a window into the miracle of life and our sense of home.
“Days” The sun traversesthe sky’s arc over sunflowers and sage grasses below the Black Hills.Today expandsthe span past forty thousand days since white men’s blood fed the soil at Little Big Horn. Day passes day.Shame scatters whimpering songs between wind-carved sandstone buttes.Day after daythis proud straight-haired imagineer wishes for an eagle bone flute worked by … More “Days”
You didn’t let me know you would just turn the browned bronze knob and open the creaking door, look at me, worry smeared on your face like eye liner smeared on a crying mother surrounded by tangled chestnut locks bedraggled from a night of fretting. Skull in my bony grip I fight this shrew … More “Woods” are the places a man can go to heal, to be healed with the ones they love.
In the previous entry I posted a draft of a poem about despair on our lack of limits. This entry includes a revision. Last year, close my childhood home, yet another patch of woodland was cut to put in a new “development” of apartments and townhouses. More of the same things encroaching on diminishing beauty. It … More When my #home is damaged. When the land is impoverished.
Peter Walks for Democracy 