Words, wild and domestic make me their natural habitat, a ruby throated hummingbird and Grandma’s bleating goat, its newest kid born at midnight, and a black rabbit named George, who walked on a leash, and oh, our geese who daily assaulted my mother, a woman with secrets. We should have heeded those birds. On safari…

But I could not bring home Salvadori, our tour guide in Rome, nor a water taxi in Venice, nor coffee at the Cafe Florian amidst new college graduates wearing laurel wreaths for hats in Piazza San Marco. And sorry, but I left behind me the bright colors of houses on Burano, as well as the…

Watching my fingers flex across the paper, I split into writer and reader. Part of me balks at flaws, part of me flicks the driving whip–trot on. And I’m in the jog cart driving my horse down a dirt road on the farm in Buxton. Horse and human focus on forward movement, no halt on…

Instead of posting a poem this week, I want to highlight a collection of poetry that I often go back to read again, The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street. As important as is this hefty collection of poems written by talented poets is the cover blurb by Edward Hirsch, a poet…

Longing for escape pulls me toward an unpopulated landscape, to natural grandeur given the edge that the mind needs, as I give an edge to days fading into night, but guilt free, leaving no tire tracks on the land. No need for the gear a body demands, no risk of bruising whatever crosses my path,…