• ON 15 YEARS

    Today is my 15th wedding anniversary, and that merits a special posting to the person who has completed me in ways I never imagined possible. The sheer inadequacy of words is made painfully manifest today. I grasp at words: love, passion, joy and each still falls short of its intended mark. There is a moment…


  • EARLY MORNING

    Early this morning as I drove through the mist that clings to Portland in March like a child’s yellow slicker, I thought of you, home, asleep on our bed, my side tidy, no faint indentation of life, and I thought of the thousands who have died to date in Iraq, who never again will leave…


  • RIVERS

    I have never been particularly one for rivers. Like everyone, I’ve walked along their shores, listened to them gurgle under remote bridges but otherwise never paid them much attention. There’s an old Buddhist saying you can’t step into the same river twice, but that presupposes you step into the river the first time. I remember…


  • DEMONS

    In the night there are no demons just the sound of your breathing soft, as your touch on my back, your foot against my calf.


  • DHARMA

    In Tibet there are more than 80 words to describe states of consciousness, several words to explain the sound of prayer flags rustling in a Himalayan breeze that reaches up to the crest of the peaks that lick at the slowly gathering clouds, all of these words never uttered. There are no words in Tibet…


  • EXPECTATIONS

    You say you appreciate occasional gifts of symbols of love. You expect me to bring you a rose it’s satin petals gently curling back at the edges, always threatening to suddenly unfold, alluring, drawing in the eye promising warmth and release. I bring you an onion, wrapped tightly, it’s papered skin, the luminescence threatening to…


  • AMOUR

    A voice clear, jazz straight up in six strings with no surprises, but sitting next to my wife and lover it is what an evening wants in much the same way as a night in the heart of winter demands spooning beneath the blanket pulled up to our chins the outside world, having ceased to…


  • AMOUR OR LESS

    I stumbled in love with you, she said because I’ve always had this great fear of falling. It must come from my childhood, though I can’t recall any specific incident, just the deep bruises my parents left when they fell, without warning out of the love I thought had to last forever.


  • FALLING

    I stumbled in love with you, she said, because I’ve always had this great fear of falling. It must come from my childhood though I can’t recall any specific incident, just the deep bruises my parents left when they fell, without warning, out of the love I thought had to last forever.


  • MORNING BECOMES

    We awaken and look at each other as though we are meeting for the first time. Your eyes seem new to me, but well remembered, a place I have often been, which is always new, always where I want to go, from which I want to never return. I trace your chin, your shoulder-blade, and…