rooftop garden
the lingering embrace
of wildfire smoke
Sometimes you have to go to the city to understand a forest, or out into nature to grasp the inner workings of city life. In Central Park, those poor horses get all her attention. She snaps careful photos of the odd rose-colored pigeon in the vast canyon of Madison Avenue. Shoots videos of ordinary squirrels darting around the stone benches that line Fifth near the Frick. I feel everything click into place when staring at the moon-viewing terrace, koi pond, and feng monoliths set on end in the Ming Scholar’s Retreat inside the Met.
star-shaped hairs
on young sycamore leaves
the clock in the cathedral
is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, where he has been teaching for eighteen years after earning a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Earthen (Finishing Line Press, 2023); a study of John Milton’s poetry, The End of Learning (Routledge, 2006); and over two dozen scholarly articles. Lately, he has been teaching long poems from the European tradition and writing short ones after the Japanese tradition. His own poems long and short have recently appeared in Bennington Review, Blithe Spirit, The Briar Cliff Review, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, The Haibun Journal, Presence, and elsewhere. His haibun “Skyline” (The Haibun Journal 4.2, 2022) was recently longlisted for the first Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun.
