Selected Poems

I Try to Listen to the Rain

I wanted to listen to the rain—
really listen, ears and pores and mind
wide open, as if I were a dry creek,
a newly planted seed, a sapling
desperate for water—
but already my mind
natters away at language, floods
with sounds of swoosh and rush and patter,
cannot hush, busy with its clumsy translation,
an approximation of what the rain might tell me
if I could be a patch of moss, a mountain laurel,
if I could listen without inserting myself into
every conversation.

Those Questions

Warm enough in October to sit
outside without a jacket, barefoot.
The seasons broken.

A mourning dove calls: Why
do you grieve? This world,
I answer. And what makes you

rejoice? This world, I answer.
Always those same questions,
that same response.