When Things Happen in Threes

When every-day concerns cease to matter
and you can only reflect. When you are paralyzed
by hundreds of candles lit with sobs. When
strangers embrace.

When the cold night bites at your skin,
But you don’t notice. When near silence
drapes an arm around you. When tearful voices struggle
to tell their story.

When we question everything.
When we sense all those gathered.
When we feel the enormity of grief.

Perhaps then we can go on living.

Sunset Over Sturgeon Bay

You may think I dim and fade—
A mere illusion and testament to my skill.
The pastel warmth is not a failing,
It is a badge I wear constantly.
But then, you would not know,
You have nothing to mark you.

I might have thought it was below you
To speak to such a terrestrial body.
I am marked; the Skillagalee lighthouse*
Is pinned on me; it is my badge.
I have countless others, attempting to spare lives,
After I took so many into me.

That is no badge, it is a scar.
A feeble attempt to recreate my likeness
When I grow tired of gracing you
With my ethereal presence.

Braggart! You may be life-giving,
But they call me and my brethren ‘great’ for a reason:
We inspire and breathe life through fear;
Through epic fishermen’s tales, and millennia of myth.

Life-giving? You insult me, puddle!
I did not give life like a gift,
I created it. It is my brain-child, my own.
You are too, and I can burn your glassy surface,
Make it blush and bleed.

You can try, lazy orb,
But my depths and my darkness
Will douse your fires
And swallow you whole.



*The Skillagalee lighthouse is on the Northeast coast of Lake Michigan. It was first lit in 1888 and marks a small island leading to the Straights of Mackinac. It is still used today for ship navigation.

Bone Fire

Bright Aurora Borealis dances
in curves and pleats,
but we are too far south,
and with a stark dream of her northerly colors,
she impales herself upon the sliver of a moon.

Pallid fire-light flickers on the sand
and we can see a full dome
of stars because of the darkness,
the crashing lake and the
low evergreen dunes.

The pallet of this landscape
is a tense, brilliant-pale reflection
of what dark-matter must look like.

And we’re on the beach wanting
simply to live, and enjoy, and flick
pebbles into the bon-fire, watching
them crash into embers like waves on the shore
or a star burning itself out.

A New Englad Wood

At the edge of a New England wood
there is a crumbling stone wall,
so painstakingly and lovingly built,
or not built but crafted
from boulders dug from the earth
to make room in the soil, barely suitable for
subsistence farming.

Beyond the wood and its aging boundary
is a plush Scotts™ lawn,
chemical turf builder applied in spring,
pots of Miracle-Gro with
grocery store tomato plants,
and a newly constructed
four bedroom, three bath, colonial-style house
with double-paned glass and central air.

The wall seems to pen-in oaks and maples and ferns,
a comically small barrier to hold in such a forest.
Or perhaps it isn’t the wall;
perhaps it is the few trees that escaped,
mocking the walls feeble attempts,
who hold the forest at bay
like soldiers guarding the house.