In summer my fingernails grow like weeds— just grow and grow and there’s no stopping them. All that vitamin d; sunlight so I have to clip, trim, file. Sand down the edges that snag on my shirt or a neighboring nail. They’re long now, but instead of cutting, clipping, reigning in, I have the urge… Continue reading Summer swords
Along windswept edges of town amid stern midcentury angles, a bright unsunny light filters and glances; limns the geometric emptinesses between things on a weekend in shoulder season on a slip of land off the coast of Long Island. The color of the wood sea-silvered— salt boxes beheaded, re-envisioned by exacting minds, rise out of… Continue reading An austerity of angles sprouting from wild grasses
One of the reasons I enjoy poetry is because it comprises all of my favorite ways of making. It’s creating images with words, yes; a kind of storytelling. But it’s about so much more than just the correct or precise words —more than denotation or connotation— it’s also about design. It’s about how the words interact… Continue reading The shapes created by the spaces between things
WordPress Discover did me the honor of sharing one of my recent posts yesterday, for which I’m grateful. I'm happy to say Hi! and thanks for reading my work. It means a lot when my words or images connect with people. So, thank you again. As a number of you’ve just arrived via the portal… Continue reading To visitors who’ve recently discovered this place
In the ellipses between drops of rain In the space between pale night’s end and grey morning I find you. I find forgotten things. Between lines of writing in the pages of books yellowing in drawers and on shelves, In the leathery slips between their bindings— And in the spaces between the notes of songs… Continue reading Spaces
Here are the days— Heat, haze on the horizon like a matte painting, wavering This part of summer finds me un-hungry. I have no appetite. My desires simplified, bleached like the half-shells of bi-valves, left hollow on the sand. The sounds of waves, shrieking gulls, soft wind— And the gradual granular erosion of my skin,… Continue reading From here I can see the curve of of the earth
People disappear Sometimes all of a sudden without warning. Sometimes gradually like sunset on the longest day of the year, or how long it takes some trees to become naked in the face of oncoming winter. One way is like hitting a brick wall. The other is more torturous. An ongoing awareness tracing the slow… Continue reading Leave(s)
The morning, bright and grey, has brought that soft, all-day rain peculiar to certain regions, like here. Neither dire nor gloomy; gentle patterings on the sill And out the streetside window— Wet roads that sound like crushed velvet or old dresses, piled flat in a secondhand store. No slantwise wind or biting air Just a fine steady… Continue reading A Spring rain, soon forgotten
Saturday evening there was a fundraising event on the historic museum barge in Red Hook; the reading of every last canto of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, as read by a number of local luminaries. It began before and ended just after sunset over Brooklyn's Buttermilk Channel and Erie Basin, the once-Dutch, fierce little neighborhood called Red Hook. I've… Continue reading Song of Myself, on a barge in Red Hook
An outboard motor, its rotors dull and pitted, hangs from a century-old beam among the rafters. The darkness up there would be forbidding, were it not for the string of lights ‘round the mirror Which smudged reflection is filled with faces, flickering in shadows Of candles and various states of inebriation. The man behind the… Continue reading From the archive: an outboard motor and a few lines
e daggar art: THE MUSEUM 