Published Poetry
I am a fiction writer primarily although I have published some poetry.
The first two poems below were originally published by Potpourri: A Magazine of the Literary Arts. The last poem appeared as an Editor’s Choice Award winner in a volume of The National Library of Poetry.
REFLECTIONS ON PORTER’S DUO FOR VIOLA AND HARP
Like a day in February,
I slipped into the falsest spring.
With temples brushed in moist coolness,
Into the inward intimacy of enclosed warmth, I settled
Though outwardly the world belied such early
Beginnings.
And, then,
The subtle intonations of your voice
Lifted as dawn upon an island’s shore
Where strains of your most delicate passages
Pursued the morning flight of doves.
And I
Raised from seaside slumbers,
A willowy lyre
Content to wrap my own compliant melody
Around the beauty of your song
As even, that day, the powdery February mist
Wove round a glistening branch
Whispering droplets upon its frosted form—
Gentle touches and dampened tones of mist and melody.
Unnaturally, no light proceeded from the dawn.
Spring’s blight transformed doves
Into the coldest lace of snow.
Yet still, your notes resounding with eternal echoes
Wash upon empty banks of darkened silence.
And,
Mute and motionless,
I listen
Listen to Porter's Duo for Viola and Harp
MIDWEST MORNINGS: AGE TWELVE
Fountains of grasshoppers spraying my legs,
I climbed the combine’s graying ladder,
leapt in a silvery ship’s hull,
made the ocean’s metallic thunder
scatter
the cicadas’
silence
undulating
through ripened fields,
rippling with more potent possibilities.
I lay flat in my brown skinniness,
on the battle gangplank,
parched and ignorant,
forgetful of dust devils
scorched and dying
in daylight,
inverting the world,
dripping, diving, drifting,
drenched in the sky’s watercolor
to surface oh so content that each tiny
grasshopper eye, like mine,
was flooded with visions
from at least
a thousand
other
eyes
yet
tinier
BESIDE THE GOLDEN SHORE
Shocked, you asked the meaning of
California or Bust when, displaced in Paris,
one after the other, we passed
graying photos of disenchanted Okies
watching us blankly watching them as they
sputtered in rickety pickups filled with
mattresses and ragamuffins,
tempest-tossed children of the Great Depression.
And they migrated upward through the paths
of collective memory, your ancestors also,
upward, westward to the Zagros Mountains
they traveled, Kurdish dust filming the gaudy
technicolor of tribal garb, Kurdish sun
jingling the gold bangles of ancient coin,
established offspring of the Fertile Crescent.
We thought of such things,
waiting for your visa.