-  - William Butler Yeats said, " We can make our minds so like clear water that beings gather around us, that t...

- - I began this poem by cataloging things that are set away for another time. While writing I became nostalgic and thought of my Uncle Ji...

- - This poem is an attempt at plagiarism. I come from poetry lessons with Robert Kelly and Diane Wakoski who taught that copying the poems...

- - Caravanserai Cords of silken blood flow in the peaks and passes of my body, a traveling miracle, while I read the news, all of...

- - My parents with me after Dad had preached his sermon one Sunday, probably in 1959; I'm guessing it was Mother's Day; I am the yo...

- - the bouquet I carried in our daughter's wedding, dried in l'atelier; with my stick woman I love a wedding, with its organza and...

- - I am not much use with my hands. I have bent them to work in an office on computers. They are weak, sore, pitiful. I hold a needle to a...

- - What I want is not the turkey on the platter, which seems too big for the spot where Grandma is placing it. And how is she carrying it ...

- - A mother's breasts My body in the tub, candlelit, doughy breasts shining, and because of the baby to come from my daughter’...

- - Meditations in the stitches of a baby quilt “Pins and needles” tingle in my fingers while I push a tiny needle through calico i...

- - Our street might as well have been the River Jordan. In my small town growing up our church anchored one corner, and another church t...

- - Trade your cleverness for abandonment.  ~ Rumi Frederick Leighton’s painting of a music lesson (see note below), perhaps between mothe...

- -   Our Lady, and the onions of Chartres Her mismatched spires grow like flamboyant Gothic stalks of wheat and corn out of the fec...

- - In a train Never have I loved so well the life given me as when I was rocked by the four o’clock train from Chicago to Lansing in ...

- - When I was an adolescent in my mother’s kitchen, eating ambrosia salad and pork steaks with gravy made from canned mushroom soup, I was...

- - These are shared taxis, called "dolmuş" in Istanbul; photo from the late 1980s; "dolmuş" (pronounced dolmush) is ...

- - Nelson's mandala "synch-ro-ni-zing" It never once occurred to me to write a Nouvelle 55 for my 55th birthday. But it di...

- - I am on vacation ( stay-cation ) and am 'supposed' to be working on my book this morning, a self publishing project that I hop...

- - no, it's not raining here, this is a memory In the heat        I remember the smother of hot nights, the dark shiftless touch o...

- - I haven't said much here about my journey away from religion. I'd rather not get into it much on the blog, as it's a conver...