POETRY · SELECTED VERSE
The poem keeps what argument would otherwise finish.
A deliberately narrow selection: twelve poems on relation, defense, appetite, civic memory, land, weather, scale, embodiment, vigilance, freedom, reference systems, voice, and the terms by which living things remain themselves.
This page is a selection, not an archive. Work remains public here only when it strengthens the whole.
FOUR AT THE THRESHOLD
Four different engines.
Relation, botanical defense, exacting labor, and documentary civic memory. Together they establish the range of the selected work without asking quantity to stand in for quality.
SEPARATION · TRANSMISSION
Each With Its Own Air
Bubbles travel as a company while each preserves the pressure that makes it itself.
CIVIC MEMORY · PHILADELPHIA
Philadelphia, Election Day
Octavius Catto, suffrage, City Hall, and the distance a city preserved between ideal and protection.
SELECTED POEMS
Eight further poems.
Vigilance and freedom, botanical access, field attention, August abundance, remembered coast, endurance, reference and belonging, and the changing range of a lived voice.
FREEDOM · VIGILANCE
A Tuesday With No Use
Inherited vigilance gives way to the radical wish for a day that asks nothing of the body but presence.
CACTUS · ACCESS
The Hand Is Too Large
The plant admits touch by size; its only open door is scaled to wings.
REFERENCE SYSTEMS · BELONGING
Several Geometries
A person changes position without moving as rooms, categories, and borders alter the geometry around them.
PRUNING · ENDURANCE
After the Pruning
Endurance is praised after the fact, when the knife that shaped it has already disappeared from view.
VOICE · RANGE
Range
A singer discovers that range is not ascent but how much of the instrument one can inhabit.
BEYOND THE POEMS
The larger literary corpus lives in Writing.
Lyric prose, essays, meditations, research-backed literary work, and book-scale projects remain public without being asked to masquerade as poems.