Boxes
I spent the Labor Day weekend sorting through cardboard coffins—a.k.a., Bankers Boxes—crammed with my “papers.” Once upon a time, these sheets were bright with blankness. Then I saw fit to deface them with my...
Tagged: Poetry
Poet Bling
One time, Bernadette, Phil, and I were going to an art event in Saratoga Springs. The two of them, of course, are poets and looked like it. I look like something else and was...
How Sustainable is the Idea of Sustainability?
[The following essay was written in 2002. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”] Having gone through a forestry education back in the 1970s, and being a skeptic by nature when...
My Friend Stops By
I’m expecting my friend to stop by. He’s just back from a long trip and says he has something to show me. As I’m waiting for him to arrive, I sort through the day’s...
A Memory Resurrected
They say that memory is a kind of treasure house, but I’ve always thought of it more as a graveyard without monuments. It’s easy to lose track of what’s buried there. Recently I was...
The Widow Jane Mine
The Widow Jane Mine. Nobody knows how it got its name. Jane—as well as any connection she might have had with this long-idle natural cement mine in Rosendale, New York—is lost to history. What...
Rules for the Mystical Poetry Contest
Michael Ruby and I spent a Sunday afternoon in late April talking poetry at his farmhouse. We took a long walk in the woods and heard birdsong and worried about ticks in the grass....