this sudden burst of life, verdant and alive,    as if unable to wait       the celebration

Dusk on the Island and I look east to the mainland coast.

Your hands, the rough and calloused ones that worked great wonders feeding thousands, healing blind and palsied poor.

I liked to hide beneath the catalpa tree on the terraces behind my house. Its huge, heart-shaped leaves hid me.

Spinning Earth and Moon shift us from light to shadow and pull the swollen water back high onto the shores of Western Bay.

She holds the brush like a hammer pounding her vision like nails to wood while colours howl and cry on the canvas.

smiling with lipless mouths, winking with lidless eyes their brittle bones clacking and clattering in an ancient percussive rhythm

Death's route is serpentine, winding in and out of dreams and memories like a river moving across the land.

You asked where God is and meant it as sincerely as your nightly request for a glass of water by the bed.

Bid me come, and free my feet...

Morning swells like a leaven as I follow my hunger

He observes every ant, every roly poly, every gnat. A rock is an occasion.

Standing in the dark, searching the night sky for meteor streaks, I hear a deer whuff distress

I freeze-frame the glacial way he’d rise from his recliner, brace against his walker to greet me— when, in his day, he’d crave a ticket an

An orchard has many seasons, each tree its sequence of life following a dormancy masked as death.

And now I find myself between two deaths, longing to live more fully, awaiting a body not discarded but renewed.

I’m sitting next to a man missing the tips of his ears like they were bitten or ripped off he can’t see too good either...

I start where I was borne out of my sadness, the Maine coast where the veil was lifted and I could suddenly see again...

If bodies are more than spirit vessels, what then was the bird: Messenger? Message?

let my poetry live out loud among starfish and coral,