Recent Poems



Where Plovers Complain

When my body rouses at the slightest
and I fear you will not return, and our lives
shrivel from the world's trumpeting,
I go to rest, in silence, where your spirit speaks,
where plovers' complaints precede the dawn,
in a cover where waves continuously crest and crush.
I come into the resonance of that music
unmediated by voice or strings. And I know
around me a cantus firmus not bound to earth.



Through the Hut Door at Aslan's Keep

Don't stop! Further up and further in!" called Farsight...
--C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

Your gaze along and through Yosemite's valley,
from lustrous river to the Sierras' rim,
bids you, Come, you must come to see
what's further up and further in.

When shadows narrow the valley floor,
light outlines the scars, the inner shine
of the sheered-off granite faces, and opens the door
to further up, and further in,

into stone thrust up by earth's shambling deep,
stone clothed with light, stone that calls, Come in,
into our room, our enormous keep.
Come, further up, and further in.

As we glide in, the door expands
and this valley widens through all mountains
and brings us to them, mere borderlands
to further up and further in

where we ascend the spray of waterfalls
to more fragrant air, to fields of lupin,
dimpled under a sky's open parasol,
the edge of further up and further in,

up Tenaya's gorge and smooth rock bowl
and around the sun-edged curve of a mountain
to see beyond the higher altitudes
what's further up and further in.

Adult finalist in the 2007 Sierra Foothill Poetry Contest, and published
in Little Town, USA, 2007 (Auburn, Calif. : Singing Tree Press, 2007),
p.22-23. Slightly revised.

to pirouette

center your balance, stay
calm, place your leg in  a
deep plie, lift yourself
over your toes, and turn,
and turn, and turn again.

To turn, and turn again
feel the turn, left knee out,
your arms held gently in,
then on demiplie,
come down solid, erect.

Published in Brevities,
no.58, Dec 2007, p.1



Thomas' Wish, or Bypass Surgery

With thanks to Rhonda Perryman

the surgeon's scar--
the cross he left upon your heart,
the surgeon's scar--
hideous symbol, axlebar,
emblem of life, a mapped chart
to our blood kin, our counterparts:
the surgeon's scar.

the surgeon's scar--
I trace my finger on your chest,
the surgeon's scar--
and I too, now life's door's ajar,
will wake alive and be twice blessed--
In our blood kinship I will rest
on our surgeon's scar.

  Published in Time of Singing,  Winter 2007