Every Good Morning

Even when I dream of solitude, I know I cannot endure it. I imagine some cabin near Katahdin, the two of us deep in January at the end of a road, daylight at 8, lights on at 3, silence all day, feeding a fire in the stove all day, the phones useless, just books and walks and the existence of winter bears. Then the crazy would set in. I’m the […]

The dread is with me every morning and sets more deeply into me each day of what I think of as slippage towards an apocalyptic time to come.  My imagination plagues me. My imagination wakes me up, and at 3 or 4 in the morning I conjure visions of what this country has done to itself and how much worse it will become. I do not know how to shut […]

Joe Pye Weed grows to eight feet and spans a distance in its blooms the length of my outstretched arms. The rain and heat of these months have made it the richest spot for butterflies we have ever seen here: Buckeyes, Swallowtails Tiger and Black, Eastern Tailed Blues, Hummingbird Moths, Pearl Crescents and Monarchs. We cannot count them, there are so many, and they move from bloom to bloom to […]

Driving slowly on back roads nearing Crow’s Nest while listening to dead poets read their poems trying so hard to push their words through all that space and time and into me, driving so slowly a brown thrasher curved out of brush and across my windshield, his markings catching red in the afternoon sun. Running the dogs in and out of cornfields, sparrows rising up in threes and fours from scrub. Walking the margins […]