The Irwell - a river poem Rock-solid ground loosens,    shifts to liquid,    slips fast away beneath my feet.      The water dreams of boats, of willow banks,    not a foul stream of refuse    but a seam alive with freshwater shrimp,    roach, and brown trout.      A mallard halts —    strums his feathers,    beats the air into rhythm,    poised to rise above this stretch,    this blue-lined artery    we call the River Irwell.

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem   On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew.   Wild sheep chewed grass; deer   And bison chewed too.   On a slanted hillside white mountain goats   Enjoyed a lofty view.   In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew.   And fire-green firs with purple cones,   Did too.   For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans   Wet with green and blue –   And oceans for the whale and dolphin too.     On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew   H

Death of a House Sparrow       Scraping his toes in the fine dirt,   the handsome house sparrow   lowered his whitish belly   to the...

Beneath a red lightbulb innumerable doves swim as if in a cold, gold sun.   Birth, creation, a ruinous origination. Decomposition settles...

A Marvellous Garden the garden is a luscious lover crushed wine on lips the dark-eyed junco's throat full of whistles and trills the...

A minute before midnight, the owl of Minerva watches today grow fat behind time’s horizon. At twelve he blinks. One eye for the night of...

My thoughts turn to the sea: there the convolutions of time deliquesce into wavelike ease, closer to the rhythms of myself. It is where...