Here are a few samples selected from the eighty-nine poems in this volume.  If you decide to order this book, click the email address below.  Be sure to include the following in your message:  (1) title of book being ordered, (2) your full name and mailing address.

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Grandfather Clock I watch you,                                           dark and beautiful as the walnut from which you’re milled, woo tomorrow into yesterday and lure it back again Your brass weights drop and your pendulum swings another instant into memory Beat by beat your hands circle, pointing to the end of this story Impassively your gears turn through the revolutions of our time marked by the brief chiming of your hours I enter a timeless instant, your pendulum stopped at the top of its arc before it swings back, a moment dense with what has been – brimming with what shall be	Anniversary How brash, bold, naïve! How romantic to make those promises. We were young and innocent in the ways of the world, let alone the ways of love – although we did not think so. How could we have known then that after all these years we would still love each other? Was it good luck? Were we wiser than our years? Or was it bred in the bone back many generations that promises are for keeping – especially promises of love?
Dragonfly Something there is in the universe that prefers small. Or, so it seems today at this tidal marsh where I pause to be amazed by a bug in flight. It glistens electric blue and phosphorescent green under the spot-light of July sun where it puts on a show of such acrobatic speed, swoops and swings that it warrants applause – not alone for its dexterity, for its ancestry as well. Can you believe a lineage of 300,000,000 years! Whatever wiped out the dinosaurs missed these fleet acrobats, as did the great Black Plague and the karma that brings down empires.	Distraction Easily distracted from my work – this morning it is an ordinary gray squirrel who makes me put down my pencil High in the pitch pine outside my study window he sits eye-level with me, barely twenty feet away. He stares.  I stare back Consider this possibility, I am distracting this small creature from his work gathering stores of seed and acorn against winter’s sure coming or perhaps distraction is his proper work and mine, in this moment, as we each try to look into another’s world, proximate, intriguing, veiled and beyond our reach – like Palestine looming large in today’s dark headlines as did Baghdad and Darfur the day before Where in our stunning world I wonder is a small furry creature that might distract warriors from their sad work?
Invitation "I don't mind dying – But I'd hate to die all alone" Langston Hughes My death I do not wish, but do not fear. The later, lovely seasons now hold sway. Companions on my journey, gather near. From earliest memory it’s been clear we walk this mortal path with feet of clay. My death I do not wish, but do not fear. Life's race has now been run with those held dear – the pain, the bliss, the plodding middle days. Companions on my journey, gather near. Regrets, of course, I have.  This pain I bear, yet still delight in love and work and play. My death I do not wish, but do not fear. Youth’s fondest hopes for justice are not here. Our dreams still call us to a better day. Companions on my journey, gather near. I’ve loved and been loved all these bounding years, not perfectly, but well enough, I’d say. My death I do not wish, but do not fear. Companions on my journey, gather near.	Shimmering Day What shall be done within this shimmering day given by wind and snow, the blinding snow driven against this window where I stay just inches from December’s stunning blow of  mercy slant, holding in check the season’s bleakness of leafless trees and lifeless flowers? Mounding drifts besiege the door.  Good reason to stay within and wile away the hours, cozy by the cloistered fire that warms this room, and rising on the chimney draft in dance of flame and smoke, calls forth free-form reverie of  unthought thoughts by which we craft our lives and touch the shadowed gods within who hold us steady in fierce Advent winds.
Rogue Wave For Margaret and Robert Croteau Died September 20, 1999, Schoodic Point, Maine Yesterday from this same rock on which I stand today a rogue wave swept you to your death After the terror I wonder if your dying was beautiful and vast like the sea that now lifts and falls against this rock and calls my wondering further than it can go out across dark vistas glistening in the morning sun? And I wonder at how beauty and death ride together on the same terrible wave	Elusive A something so transporting bright Emily Dickinson You elude me like the holy presence of an ancient tribe that will not write your name or speak it, like the music in his head that will not flow through Mozart’s pen, like the light that dances in Van Gogh’s brush but on the canvass dims. Sometimes in the morning sun of early May you tremble on the dogwood blooms lifted high above their limbs by sudden rushing wind -- and then are gone.