I got a letter years ago from a man who said he liked the poetry I write that he hasn’t ever liked poetry because it always makes things more complicated than they are but that my poems about living in the mountains about working with my...

in the basement is the water heater it is new and is a dull grey and was just put in by my friend who is a plumber our old one was broken and for months we suffered short showers and shivering exits into cold air it is the end of the day now and I...

people are dying  in the hospital  next door to the quick stop but right now  we are alive  and I need gas  and so we stop  and get the snacks  that we know will kill us and the stuff  that makes...

I once read a paragraph in a book that’s stuck like splinter in the grey of my brain in essence it said that we look at fish in water we look at birds in the sky and see them as free but that they are not free for they are slaves to...

there is a box full of noise it is small enough to hold in my hand sometimes it feels like the box and its noise is all that matters I go to it when I am happy when I am sad when I want to be happy when I want to be sad when I...

so much that was plains grass when I was a kid is now townhouses highways strip malls and warehouses I have not been alive that long yet I remember this place so much emptier wilder wider than it is now how strange it is to see so much built in so...

I’m awake in the middle of the night I stare up at the dark trying not to move trying not to wake my lover beside me I cannot fall back to sleep and so I begin to go over my life there is so much I’m worried about work and writing and the...

driving by a construction vehicle rental place there are maybe twenty bucket crane trucks with their booms fully extended in the air by the highway side and some miracle happens for in the rusty suburban sunset the shadows of the cranes stretch...

I turn up an back road to try and get around some construction and suddenly I am lost in a place where I have lived for most of my life what a strange thing there are new houses new views of the mountains the trees seem bigger for a second I feel...

six geese fly true north along the rocky mountain spine of the west in a loose v below a low white sky over the eastbound highway I wonder how they know which direction to go how nice would it be to have a sense of purpose an instinctual...

on a rare weekday off we hit the mountain the same one where 27 years ago I learned how to ski and where I have skied most of my life there is the old lodge which looks and smells the same as it always has the only difference is that the chicken...

stars are echoes cast out into the dark which tumble through the nothingness and in a forever we could scarcely imagine if we take a moment to look up reach our eyes these blips of long ago light gone from where they came from but...

mostly a house sits empty it is built to hold lives and those who hold those lives in their bodies must work to afford the house and so a house sits empty but sometimes we are home this is when we are in the house our two lives who this house...

I often write about how humans are supposed to be the shepherds of nature how our place in the world was to tend to the forests was to tend the animals was to help the cycle of coexistence not to break it but I realize now the limit of my...

waiting for a light to change I watch the snow melt into long drops of water on the windshield of my truck it’s so cold today that I can feel my nostrils freezing as I step outside but the sun still shines and turns ice to water turns snow to...

we are working on a house where a fire came through less than five years ago I remember right after the thing was contained driving through these woods it looked like a bomb went off a metal garage had melted into a puddle which shone dully in the...

I go to the grocery store and Los Angeles is on fire and so is the Middle East but in a different way and somebody behind me in line says it’s the driest January in one hundred years and I buy some apple sauce and some cough syrup and some sliced...

everything feels different  on the last day of the year  it’s a small sort of death  the last sandwich for lunch  the last gallon of gas  the last long drive home  in after work traffic  the last credit...

what is it about the ocean that we find so captivating is it that most of us do not get to see it often that it is a trek to get there and thus special because of its novelty or perhaps instead there is something instinctual in us because so long...

I guess I’m lucky today in that I’ve watched the sunrise and sunset and they were both pink and framed by mountains and plains grass and puddles of snowmelt which themselves cause the color of the sky turning pink and blue and white it really...