From Missa Profana

Take This

Hold me, hold me, hold me,
Night Squad, up close.
Millions I've risked to tell you this story:
Osama isn't helpless.
Reckless if we get caught
in this game they call law
Osama isn't helpless

In the archives of wasted time
(our little gift to those we value),
hope minus nerve
passes for imagination,
and every dream stiffens
our resolve to be brave
and oh so frugal stewards
of Molly's "rocks" -- diamonds of time--
while waiting waiting waiting.

Camouflage

Look deeply into any leaves on the page,
slip the gaze to the dense mess,
noisy growth, every tree a piece
of a remote and charmed forest, maybe Broceliande,
rotting logs smell of a good Bordeaux,
bright tiny leaves, from doll house trees
spy the naughty monkeys, seven spoons, two kangaroos
or the dinghy stranded high in wavy branches.
A solemn face behind the vines where
leaf makes a cheek as tendrils fuse to curls.
Stay. No one dreams you're here
listen and they won't know
watch without speaking up
but don't move quickly.
You're not going anywhere.
Secret pleasures lurk near margins
claimed by forgotten children
in the Amsterdam attics of the soul
blasted loose only ages later after the war ends
yellowed treaty signed, property divided
decades after all those beads,
years, grasped, held, pinched,
squeezed and prayed upon.
No one will notice
in the rich picture
the tears in the runnels of raindrops,
the scars in the toothed roof
of leaf veins, or that
you have never stopped staring
sighing or wanting to move.

^

Biography

My work has appeared in Contemporary Poetry of New England published by University Press of New England (Middlebury College), in Atlanta Review and is soon to appear in St. Austin's Review in London. I have won the John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America, and my book-length manuscript was a finalist in the National Poetry Series Open Competition. I live in Vermont and teach literature in a college here. I also hold an appointment as Visiting Professor of Humanities at John Cabot Universtiy in Rome.