And then you see one and wonder, were they there this whole time, roosting in the tall poplar that fell in the storm and shattered on the deck? One flew into the dinner party, in response to which our friend leapt up, ran to the kitchen for a Tupperware container, covered the frightened little mammal with her woolen cap, and flung it out the front door into the night sky. Once, just past dusk, a bat zoomed at eye level through the hallway on the tower’s ninth floor. We covered our heads with our jackets and made a bat-like break for the stairwell.
wet stone scent...
longest way around
the quickest way home
The door to the gable’s storage space stuck. Behind this resistance there seemed a will greater than my own. Its scale, unmistakably that of a young child’s playhouse, had seemed to the housebuilders to necessitate a tiny doorknob, hard for a grownup to grasp. As I tore into book boxes, I discovered guano all over the plywood floor. The torrent of yellowing paperbacks revealed nothing of use. Not finding the right words, I forced the door shut on the whole mess.
grief in the way
the hollow of each wave
flowers out
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.
