Enjoy this sampler of my poems. To read any poem in full, click on its title.
Click here to listen to audio files of my spoken poetry
Valentine: A Reply to Thomas Wyatt
Wish and want, They make a sweet music. My lute be still, you said. I have done, you said. But that was just another of your come-hithers, your rosebud-gatherings …. Continue reading >
Land
It opens, and then opens again, grows over, and changes, lose-some, gain-some. There were trees, once, deer cover, and browse, hunting grounds of hawk and owl, squirrel runs, old stumps and bark, nothing if not hospitable …. Continue reading >
Ancestors
All my mothers are here in their best dresses: mother grandmothers, great-grandmothers; of the men only my father posed with cigarette in hand and my grandmother on the sofa …. Continue Reading >
Embroidered Field
Who pulled the floss from the skein and knotted it, choosing among the colors of flowers the colors of these perfect, impossible asters, flower within flower, corymbs and umbels, stitched in a time, I will, I will not, I will, I will not. Knot …. Continue Reading >
Field as Auditorium
You say my messages did not get through What sound do messages make as they lose themselves in the ether glissando diminuendo What is the sound of my lost language …. Continue Reading >
The Puddle
In a rut in the dirt road: a vernal pool. A few small, almost transparent water striders twitch the surface, and below them, tadpoles wriggle and float in the limpid water, hundreds of them—all straining cell by cell to be among the living, the fat, full-throated racket and splurge of spring up and down the…
Excerpts from MILLSTONES
The millstone set in a front yard at the intersection of two roads in Carrboro, North Carolina, knows what we lost …. Continue Reading >
Maura High 