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I’m a writer, artist and designer who thinks way too much, and tries to see the beauty in the world.

  • Swimming thoughts

    swimming poolI don’t know how I stayed away from the water so long. A (very) minor surgery interrupted my habit of swimming 50 or so laps in an indoor pool, a half-hour meditation for me, where I immerse myself, literally, in a flow of stroking, kicking, turning, pushing off, all the while counting out the laps over and over.

    I swim as hard as I can. I am not a particularly fast swimmer, but I swim steadfastly. Speed is not the point. I concentrate on feeling my body in the water, on form, on breathing, on the dreamy beauty of the watery blue beneath me, on the mosaic-tiled black stripe I follow back and forth, back and forth.

    Even so, stray thoughts inevitably bubble up, little silvery bursts, like my underwater exhalations.

    They say when you are drowning your life flashes before you. I’m not drowning, but life has had its flooding moments lately. Last night as I pushed hard off the wall of the pool, the things I once was certain of flashed through me, more like a current of feeling than a vision, beginning with the childhood certainty that my mother would always be there to love me.

    Certainty is an illusion, yet we think sometimes—most times—that illusion is truth. These illusionary truths, these certainties we cling to, like life preservers on a choppy sea, are the very illusions that will one day have us gasping for air, trying not to drown.

    The last lap brought it home. Certainty is an illusion; Illusion is truth—So nothing’s true? I buried this tired and hopeless thought. I slept hard, and woke feeling fragile.

    Then this morning, I heard a line from one of Gregory Orr’s poems, and I dove into some of his poetry and these stanzas floated up:

    Grief will come to you.
    Grip and cling all you want,
    It makes no difference.

    Catastrophe? It’s just waiting to happen.
    Loss? You can be certain of it.

    Flow and swirl of the world.
    Carried along as if by a dark current.

    All you can do is keep swimming;
    All you can do is keep singing.

    –Gregory Orr

    (from Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved)

    And somehow these words comforted me, and so to my swimming-mind puzzle there is now a hopeful ending (thank you, Gregory Orr):

    Certainty is an illusion; Illusion is truth.
    All you can do is keep swimming; All you can do is keep singing.

    I’m not certain of hope sometimes, but I’m also not certain of hopelessness. Maybe uncertainty is truly the gift, after all? With that thought I turn, push off, keep swimming. It is just enough to make my heart softly sing as I kick and breathe my way through this watery December afternoon.

  • To a certain Facebook friend (In memory of Tamir Rice)

    “I don’t understand,” you commented, “how is it racist?
    If those kids were raised right—they wouldn’t be shot.”

    Raised right, commenting friend?
    I choke on my anger
    but I’ll try not to judge you
    I used to believe in TV news and fairy tales, too, but now
    I want you to imagine reality.

    Imagine it, commenting friend,
    you, who probably hunt ducks or deer with
    your stocky white son, tramp the countryside
    waving shotguns and rifles, never imagining:
    your son executed for playing with a pellet gun

    Imagine it, commenting friend,
    imagine your son, gunned down, then framed for his own murder
    imagine your daughter, trying to save her little brother
    imagine some asshole, hundreds, thousands of assholes, saying
    you raised him wrong

    Promise me, commenting friend
    you’ll imagine your son, wide-eyed with fear, as he bleeds
    turns the snow beneath him pink, then red, while his sister
    who ran to save him is tackled and bound
    as the officers stand, hands on hips, not even pretending to help

    Imagine later, commenting friend
    when you, rightfully outraged, sick with grief
    wait for justice
    surely this time, this time—an indictment? It’s all on video!
    He was just twelve, playing alone—surely this time, this time?
    Tell me now, commenting friend
    Do you still think it’s not a race thing?
    I’d rather reach your heart and change your mind
    than leave you untouched while children are shot and left to die.
    I bleed out, listening to you who was “raised right.”

    changingthings

    NOTE:
    3/2/15: This is a second draft of a poem originally published 12/6/14. It is quite different from draft one, and I think it says what I want to say more accurately.

    Tamir Rice was playing with a pellet gun on a Cleveland, Ohio playground when someone called the police. The caller told 911 that the gun was “probably fake.” Surveillance video released by the police shows the officers’ car pulling up right next to the boy, and shows an officer shooting Tamir in the stomach within seconds of pulling up. Tamir was 12.

    Officer Loehmann, the shooter, was not indicted.

  • Chokehold

    Icantbreathe

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Chokehold

    “I can’t breathe!”
    Eric Garner’s last words,
    gasped as Officer Pantaleo’s hands
    squeezed his windpipe shut.

    “I can’t breathe,” Garner pleaded
    as he died, begging—
    every cell in his body
    screaming for oxygen.

    “No reasonable cause,”
    said the D.A.,
    when the grand jury choked on logic
    refusing to indict even though

    the medical examiner ruled
    Garner’s death a homicide.
    “I can’t breathe!”
    protesters chanted.

    “This fight ain’t over, it just begun,”
    said Esaw Garner. In her voice
    I hear every cell in her body
    screaming, begging, pleading for justice.

  • I have been eating poetry

    photo
    New Albany, Indiana

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    I have been eating poetry

    Wildly gorging on it,
    like it was chocolate, and you know—

    I cannot keep candy in the house.
    I’d be fat as a tick, as Mama used to say.

    Poetry is calorie-free, sweeter than syrup
    but sometimes so bitter it stings going down.

    I sat alone in a softly-lit hushed restaurant last
    Saturday night, reading poetry, poetry, poetry

    and savoring vegetarian chili, roast carrots and
    a cold brown ale.

    There is no happiness like mine:
    so much poetry—no room, even, for dessert.

     

     

     

    (An ode to Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand, who died this week.)

  • Denial

    I saw a picture of
    Michael Brown’s mother
    as she heard the verdict.
    I felt her mother’s pain
    radiate into my heart,
    into my safe flat-screened life
    a roaring scream—
    and with the pain,
    my own weak shame:
    in my white-bubble youth
    I was taught justice would be served—
    to everyone, it says so right here.

    No. Justice fled, unarmed
    was shot dead
    in an alley
    on a street
    in the dark
    in the night—
    Justice was too threatening,
    I think that was it?
    Justice was gunned down
    in a hail of close-range verdicts
    excusing the inexcusable:
    racism denied is still racism.

  • Rivers

    river
    Sky above Ault Park, Cincinnati

    Rivers

    There’s a river in my
    November sky—
    a river of fathomless blue
    sweeping between
    ice-crusted snowdrift clouds
    floating high
    over bare-armed trees
    and bare-armed people.

    My teeth crunch an apple
    my feet crunch leaves as
    Monday’s snow melts into
    tiny sidewalk rivelets.
    A boy zigzags the lawn
    hunting acorns he trades
    for tired smiles from his mother.
    Love flows like a river, unstopping.

  • Why wait?

    photo

    Why wait?

    Why wait for inspiration to appear,
    surging onto your page like a whitecap
    gliding over the sand
    salty, foaming with words

    Why wait, when outside the wind sings
    naked trees wave their long arms,
    even their sturdy trunks sway, drunken

    Why wait, when the clouds above
    skate across the cold sky
    like children sliding on ice

    Why wait, when the house seems to have weighed anchor,
    rocking with every gust, creaking like an old boat
    setting off on a choppy uncharted sea

  • Pennsylvania

    Pennsylvania.

    So pleased to have my poem, Pennsylvania, published at Turk’s Head Review.

  • Aftermath

    ginkgo leaf

    Aftermath

    I feel like a river
    so full I might overflow my banks
    for years, so dry, now I am water, falling—
    falling like the ginkgo leaves,
    that lie scattered like footprints on the sidewalk,

    so rain-slicker yellow, they are wet, oh
    I had such a fever, once
    I was empty as an old Halloween pumpkin,
    scraped, drying, dry inside,
    dying I was dying, I was lying

    on my back, floating on the current
    so hot the water sizzled when it touched my skin
    I floated so long
    hypnotized by love and the sky and
    the fever’s fire

    Once I was a wound, bleeding
    Now I am welling up vivid as blood—
    maybe I could be that red rose, blooming,
    trembling in November’s
    sharp teeth

  • Indiana Sunset, November 10

    sunset and graveyard
    Ovid, Indiana

     

    photo
    Ovid, Indiana, another view

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     
    the start of a poem:

    driving home from Indiana
    sunset blazing an orange goodbye
    contrails crisscrossing the deepening sky

    speeding through billows of dust
    from the seed corn being processed
    by harvesters crawling the darkening fields

    Pendleton, Eden, Maxwell, tiny towns
    brick houses, bonfires blazing in backyards,
    November leaves burning, summer burning

    up ahead, a great pyramid of golden kernels,
    oh, how they glow, under sodium vapor lamps
    such a harvest, this year, such a farewell