The other morning, I was walking my dog when a neighbor curiously regarded my three-month-old Saint Bernard puppy and asked, “You got another dog?” “No,” I replied. “My other puppy died a month ago.” “Oh my god,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” I went on to explain that Lando was two months shy of his … Continue reading The Puppy After That One
Gita Quiet is your wrath, little cat. Marsupial-eyed, impassive, You sit like Rhadamanthus on his terrible throne. We beneath your crouching glare are Burdened by your malice— As you lose interest In us and Doze.
Cardinals Cardinal couple at the bird-feeder today, he all in red, she in orange-gray. They’re not like us, this mismatched pair, she on the snow below, he circling in the air. They never part but seldom unite, conjoined by love and freed by flight.
Dichotomy It was by our old garage door beneath a spot long favored by birds to build nests of mud and string. The neighbor’s cat had not yet found it, though by dusk its deathbed would be merely flattened grass and a tuft of down. Perhaps I had seen this one the day before, its … Continue reading A Sort of Dark Poem About Summer
Writing, for me, is like lucid dreaming. I can get so lost in my imaginary world that my realities become inverted: My desk and laptop drift into a kind of haze, while the world I'm writing about becomes vividly present. It's kind of cool, really, and when I'm in a groove like that, I hate … Continue reading What Those Chickadees Are Really Saying
To be honest, I wasn’t enthusiastic when my daughter’s riding instructor convinced us to let her compete in horse shows. Having grown up a middle-class kid in Colorado, I was suspicious of the whole East Coast horse show scene. It all seemed too focused on who had the fanciest horse and where did you buy … Continue reading What Equestrians Learn Early About Succeeding in Life
So...I've never posted any poetry on this blog before. But before I turned to nonfiction and, more recently, fiction, I wrote a ton of poetry. Animals are one of my primary subjects since they seem so immune to the stressors that plague humans. I figure every now and then I'll post one of my shorter … Continue reading A Poem About a Huge Toad
