Poems
Riding Waves, a book of poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press in February of 2018.
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Lamentation
as published by Catamaran, Fall 2025
One way to feel better is to walk through green
woods, warblers singing who knows what stories
in trees just out of view. You only need trust your
ear to take the ancient melodies under your own
wing, broken as it must be. At the end of the day,
it's enough to hear them. Another way is to think
night and day on how to save what you love, how
to stop people, bikes and dogs from trampling
down the trails, eroding the soil, scaring the birds.
How to save the whales from eating our plastic,
then dying of hunger. To stop the return of kings.
You quit the forest in order to complete endless
forms, write letters, trying to find the perfect
words. Still, do you really believe you're the first
generation to have it all taken from you? The first
to tear your robes in lamentation, wondering where
the prophets have gone? The first to build palaces
in the desert, distracting yourselves with baubles
and spectacle? The first to blow things up in fear,
not knowing which is real, the coming or the going?
Mundanity of Evil
as published by Hawaii Pacific Review
It was a holocaust play based on photos.
We saw the photos on the huge backdrop.
Bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, secretaries.
We saw them laughing, eating blueberries,
barbed wire haunting the nearby distance.
There were pictures of the innocents, too.
People waiting patiently to be loaded up
onto boxcars, waiting in line to be killed.
When the play ends, I walk away quickly.
I see you're not with me and I step away
from the crowd to wait. Standing apart,
I watch history's sad faces shuffle past,
as if each patron had brought one dead
soul along: young boys in star jackets,
women with babes in arms, long-beard
rabbis, little girls staring at the camera.
I need to escape the theatre, forget how
the SS men who ran the camp had once
been shopkeepers, candy-makers, bank
tellers. You finally get to where I am
we're both irked. You want me
to wait and I want you to keep up.
Shell Ridge Open Space
as published by Catamaran Literary Reader
I'm walking in the spring-green hills.
A lark sparrow sings from a dead branch
in the swale between patches of blue oak.
Vetch smooths the rolling land with purple
and pink and I want to lie down in it, stay.
Here's a shell-studded rock, strange cipher
to remind me of the grand array. To be alive
even like this, a miracle. The trail is narrow
and I hold out my arms, feel the oat grass
whisper through my hands, its light touch.
The grosbeak calls from branch to branch,
moving always just beyond, like a sire.
Its song sounds of longing to be free
of old ways. I am with the people I love.
Free of the ways they need me to be.
The pond turtle poised in the muddle
of the little steam disappears for months
on end; no one knows where she goes.
I could be like that. So might we all.
I dreamed last night of a naked woman
with one breast gone, her chest a lava
field of red scar ravage. Her story
came to me, as things do in dreams:
she'd sacrified her breast for love.
Needless, I thought, that she'd given
up her precious breast to save others.
As I walk, I try to dwell in wonder
at the blue in blue oak leaves and
the yellow of galls on the live oaks.
To accept the bad luck I've known.
You've got to take it for your share and go on,
said the good father in
The Yearling to his grieving son.
Once upon a time, we told ourselves
we had to become our own mothers.
Is it too late to become my own father?
My Late Breast
as published by The Sun Magazine
My late breast was a model citizen:
humble, honest, kind. She gave
to her community, always erring
on the generous side. I never knew
her to shy away from a challenge.
If there was a need, you could count
on my late breast to show up.
She leaves behind her two children
and her husband, who each adored her
in their own ways, and a lifetime
of loyal friends. She is survived
by her devoted twin, for whom
life hasn't been the same.
My late breast loved the beach.
She loved the mountains, desert,
forest. Being close to nature gave
her joy. She's been gone now
fourteen years but not a day passes
that she isn't sorely missed.
Old Words, Old Wood
as published by Catamaran
There's a quiet cave where music begins,
the resonant, perfect Dantian,
where words in winter glimmer, spark,
and flow below frozen streams.
Playing on old wood, formed
by the luthier to a feminine curve,
I call to the spruce of evergreen forest,
where the wren once perched and buzzed,
bending my ear to her hollow chamber to hear:
"You deemed your daughter so beautiful, you thought
no one must ever let her know she's just a speck
of cells in full view of two hundred billion galaxies."
While scholars count angels pirouetting
on the head of a pin, how shall I bear
dark premonitions of our self-made end?
Old words, old wood, before man's fire and brimstone
turn this spinning garden to dust, sing
to me once more, tell me of your spring.
Catastrophic Molt
as published by Comstock Review
When I held your heavy ashes
the only sound in my head
was dear Lord, the label
on this cardboard box says
"Kirk Irwin Kobler," which is
to say you're as good as dead
in my arms, while the Coroner
who gave you your final exam
has put down high falutin' words--
chronic, acute, toxicity--
we know better, Brother:
catastrophic molt, more like, as when
young penguins shed their baby feathers
all at once and then take to the waves
and if not you, then certainly me,
so let's go down to the sea to find
the star tulip, calochorus tolmiei,
which only blooms on fire-scorched earth,
and might be seen once in a life,
on the day you lose every feather.
The Helms Man
as published in New Ohio Review
The Helms Man, we called him. I mean the man in white
baker's trousers who drove the Helms Bakery van
around our bright California cul-de-sacs and streets --
coastal hills carved to asphalt, tract, and pink ice
plant that we broke open to write on sidewalks.
He drove slowly down our block, stopping to open
wide temptation's door, inviting adolescent girls in
to view his wares: jelly and glazed doughnuts,
cinnamon twists, sparkling crystal sugar. We ponied
up quarters for paper bags of treats, to be consumed
out of sight of perfect mothers, lying out in lawn chairs,
all Coppertone and Tab gleam, who gave us Teen Magazine,
left us to banana and milk diets, vertical stripes, and scales.
Left us to ripe womanhood and the gaze of men,
to shape and flavor we could never taste ourselves.
To motherhood and stretching of skin, joint loosening,
the joy of being food. Then cronehood with arroyo
of wrinkle, slump of breast, lump of belly.
Each one alone now sees herself in hollow mirror,
flattened chest, belly bulge assessed, while outside
the window, teenage girls parade in short cutoffs,
long legs supple and smooth. And our long-gone
mothers watch us watch them. We, who still hear
the van coming and run, hurry, to be ready, radiant
and thin for the helmsman, just turning the corner.
Tomales Bay
as published in Atlanta Review
Nymph, in thy orisons, be
all my sins remembered.
--William Shakespeare
Last night the moon drizzled mercury
on black water. Orion leaned over
Tomales Bay. I dreamt an animal,
stranded on the shore, slipping nearly
under, eyes reaching human-like
into my core. Huddled in blanket
on the torn-up pier, I try to pray.
Dimmest dawn breathes frail light.
Water, wooded ridge, three moored sloops,
invisibly suspended in grey-soft mist.
The loon glides by, scoring her silent music;
dips her bill twice, then dives, leaving no trace.