Browse Topics
Death
Marginalia
This book I’m reading now my mother read / and loved. You can get this close to the dead / and no closer.
March 2011
Saving Danny James
Danny James was a short, wiry, good-natured convict with a handlebar mustache and a marine haircut. At forty-six he started losing weight and having trouble with his coordination. After a plague of tests, the doctor told him that he had Lou Gehrig’s disease and that it was terminal. He had six months to live.
February 2011
Making It Last
Shared desserts, a summer romance, the last batch of pickled plums
February 2011
Everything’s Going To Be OK
I’m sitting with my old friends Ron, David, and Neil at one of the tables along the back wall of what was once my favorite bar. We’ve been pals since we were in high school, the surviving members of a close-knit group. It’s always good to get together with these guys, but it’s impossible to do so without thinking about the friends who are no longer with us.
January 2011
His Name Is John
If you hadn’t named him, you could say / it wasn’t meant to be. / If you’d had another boy, / you could’ve wiped the slate clean
January 2011Selected Poems
— from “Summer Dusk” | I put in my goddamn hearing aid / in order to listen to a bird that sounds / like the side of a drinking glass / struck lightly by a fork
December 2010The Primitive Tongue Of A Lesser Species
There’s nothing like an old dog to remind a man of his own decline. Just a few short years ago Jake and I used to take daily five-mile jogs together, but now we’ve both got arthritis — his in the hips, mine in the knee — and we’ve had to give them up. Instead we take long walks through the woods near our house.
October 2010
In My Good Death
I will find myself waist deep in high summer grass. The humming / shock of the golden light. And I will hear them before I see / them and know right away who is bounding across the field to meet / me. All my good dogs will come then
October 2010The World In Red
Floreta Cook buried her husband, Cookie, in the Questa Cemetery in New Mexico. It was a good cemetery. Cookie had always admired it. He liked the sign on the gate saying to watch out for snakes, and the cemetery grounds were bright with wreaths and saints. Cookie had believed in all the saints and gods and had seen patterns everywhere. To Floreta life was chaos, apocalypse probably just around the corner.
September 2010
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