There’s a sound that the early autumn wind makes through the cottonwoods across the way (all dash and whisper and sway) that is the sound of a faraway whistle caught on a thread of unraveling distance from an old coal train heading west; it is the sound of the last of the Canada geese hefting […]
Cottonwoods of October Read More »
Jun Fujita, Japanese-American photographer and poet of the mid-20th century, might have been the first to introduce the rest of us Americans to the tanka, an elegant form comprised of 31 syllables across a handful of lines. It’s similar to the haiku, but it provides a little more flexibility and, somehow, may seem more user-friendly.
Cheyenne Cañon: Tanka Suite Read More »
Make me cool and silent as the black cat that glides through the night beyond my open window. Pour down on my satiny skin a moon plump with Easter’s ancient promise, cascading like a string of pearls her numinous vernal generations. Settle on to my limber restless shadow just enough knowing to shake off the
They actually get paid for what they do, busily marking up giant sheets of Post-it and ripping them off to slap on the conveniently broad swathes of bland wall space. We, their captives, mostly play nice, vapid salvos hurled that add nothing much, maybe even depleting the imperiled supply of collective intelligence tidepooling here —
For a basic (one might suppose inherently neutral) law of physics, the phrase has nevertheless garnered a lion’s share of unfriendly users in the low-rent back roads of the vernacular. Many among us, in truth, would far prefer the virulent lash of a “Bitch!” or a “Bastard!” to being leveled by the
He’s a pencil sketch implausibility of a bird, high-stepping it out from the rain-drenched rushes of the pond’s edge, his neck a skinny swoosh you could almost miss, making the parabolic drama of that bill the more startling still. He reacts to some invisible shift in the wind or stirring in the pond-scrabble round his
Blue Heron of the Fountain Valley Read More »