Poetry
Winter 2004
Visiting the Lady with the Plant
It was almost going to be too late for me To go along because there were shadows Under the buckeye trees along our street, But the lady with the plant […]
Poetry
Summer/Fall 1999
Telling What Happened
The Kwakiutl said one word, L!aasso, only one To mean from that moment To the end of the next silence: I have seen a sacred apparition In the woods. It […]
Poetry
Summer/Fall 1999
The Teal’s Wing
Above the tide line, above the dead Inch-long crabs and the halves of clamshells, Beyond the contorted strands of kelp And seaweed in the sand by a driftwood stump, The […]
Poetry
Summer 1995
The Rosebush
A memory of Theodore Roethke He was going to plant a rose. He’d found it mildewed In his garage where it had lain all spring Still in its wrappings, […]
Poetry
Summer 1995
My Passenger
I was flying solo in my father’s carFor the first time. Man, I was on my way From our rusty suburb to the heart of Chicago, Full of the horsepower […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
Looking for Nellie Washington
My job in a hard timeWas to bring those people downTo the small loan manFor a mouth-to-mouth discussionWhen they’d fallen far behindLike Nellie WashingtonWho lived up a street acrossAn alley […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
Catching the Big One at Lone Lake
A Memory of Richard Hugo From the rowboat, loosely tiedTo a ruined dock, he glaredAt the enemy in the distance:The other fishermen catchingThe brightest living silverFor themselves. For him, nothing. […]
Poetry
Summer 1983
A Woman Standing in the Surf
Thigh-deep in the sea, she watches waves arriving As if those storms Thousands of miles away in starry spirals Or the long upheavals Of fire from the ocean bed or […]
Fiction
Summer 1949
Holiday
Ted stamped a row of staples along the edge of his empty lunch bag and threw it into the wastebasket. He shoved the remains of an orange after it, and […]