It Is Difficult / to Get the News from Poems
January 7, 2021 This morning I woke up remembering newspaper sticks—the old-fashioned ingenuity of their form, the honey-colored gleam of the polished wood. Does anyone still use them? My freshman year in college I worked ten hours a week in the periodicals department, and that’s when I learned there even was such a thing—they looked,...
Slumgullion Pass
I struggle to keep up with my husband Jack as we whack our way through smothering brush somewhere along Slumgullion Pass between Lake City and Creede. My lungs are working hard in the thin mountain air. Alferd Packer, the man this area is best known for, weighs heavy on my mind as he has for...
The Club from Nowhere
The oil sizzles, a spray of bubbles rippling across the pan, then the flour-coated chicken dropped in, first a thigh, then a leg, a breast, a wing, another leg, the hiss and sputter of crisping, edges ruffling, browning, the juices drawn in as a hand deftly turns and shifts the pieces in a hot pan...
Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? Everybody.
The snow was falling as I climbed the long stairs. There, beneath the spectacular dome of America’s largest mausoleum, I found— nobody. No one except a single ranger from the U.S. Park Service, that is, whom I found quietly reading a novel. He looked up at me with an expression similar to that of the Knight in Indiana...
Another Epic
I have lived in important places, times —Patrick Kavanagh I could tell you everything that happened on Linden Street the year the Berlin Wall fell. That was the year the Hanrahan boy grew his hair to the middle of his back and rode his bike down the block at seven a.m. sharp every school day....
Leopard, Snowflake, Blanket, Marble, Frost
I think of the Nez Perce, called “Pierced Noses” by French Canadian trappers, who saw some of the tribespeople wearing in their nostrils small, single dentalium shells, traded from Vancouver Island. The Nez Perce were the most skillful horse breeders among North American Indian peoples. I am drawn to their jewel, the appaloosa. Developed in...
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