Nov 24, 2021 | Aging, Alexandrine, Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme, Quatrains
I am weary; I am not tired. Though only sleep and jest are true I do not think a rest will do. The river that once ran cold and clear now chokes with green. Mired with the accumulating silt of years. Youth was all constraint and indecision: a white-cold roiling to be...
Jul 5, 2021 | Aging, Alexandrine, Commissioned, Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme
You wake before the birds, during the dark’s slow decay into the pale light of dawning day. Your mind holds thoughts— that hold no words, like dreams too-soon forgot. Outside, a lonesome cry, a beckoning belief that there is more than silent...
Dec 10, 2020 | Aging, Commissioned, Grief, Gus Stevens, Irregular Rhyme, Mom, Winter
She appears in the glass like a watermark and her image in the window tells the score. Her eyes, reflected, look blinkered, tired, sore as she scrapes the dishes clean. Inside: herself. Outside: the dark, and this old face between. It seemed just weeks...
Dec 1, 2019 | Aging, Daughter, Grief, Gus Stevens, Quatrains
She wakes from her nap with bedhead and pillow creases on her cheek then whispers, “When it’s gark out, Momma coming home?” in toddler speak. I know correcting her lisp can wait for some other afternoon so I brush her hair back and confirm,...
Feb 4, 2019 | Aging, Dream, Gus Stevens, Hexameter, Multi-Syllabic Rhyme, Sestet
Legs stirring before the alarm’s tormenting beep, I wake from strange dreams in the autumn of my youth, and choke on broken promises I meant to keep– a sludge that settles to the bottom with the truth where bottled thoughts belch the foam of cold fermented...
Jan 27, 2017 | Aging, Love, Sonnet, The Work of Greater Minds, Victorian Sonnet
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;...
