drmstream

I was a deaf boy and the trees spoke to me. I walked through the woods at night. The wind rioted around me, pulling at leaves and branches, try­ing to tear the roots from the ground. The moon­light turned hard and thin. The air was cold with the salt spray from the bay. The trees moaned dully. […]

Look at the photo and imag­ine. I am remem­ber­ing. The field was nar­rower and bor­dered by a thin wall of trees that sep­a­rated one field from the next. In win­ter, the frozen ground crunched beneath your boots, and the brit­tle corn stalks crack­led like stale cereal. The col­lar of your old army coat is bunched […]

My rea­son for lay­ing beside you and smelling like beer When you fin­ish read­ing this I want you to be able to paint The sky I saw when I walked out To the garbage bin at dusk. Look up past the spring buds Blur­ring the kinky ends of the ginko To the rib­bon of sky, upended by […]

A Japan­ese poet once wrote that there is no util­ity in metaphor, that in the mod­ern world the only valu­able expres­sion is of words that are spe­cific to one thing. This is lan­guage as the table of exis­ten­tial ele­ments: when used pre­cisely, words make an objec­tive real­ity that we can use to breach the gaps between […]

Two trees I stud­ied the topo­graph­i­cal map once To find out the secret of the two big trees In the lower yard. They were the per­ma­nent Things about that piece of land our house Had stood on for more than one hun­dred years. The two acres peaked at 480 feet above sea level And dipped in […]

I shared a bus ride in Ire­land once with a French man who car­ried more photo equip­ment than cloth­ing. It was 1979 and the bus ran local stops up into Done­gal from Killy­begs. I was on my way to a lit­tle town called Glen­columkille, where I’d spent a time­less week in a cot­tage with six […]

From Pictorymag.com. Urban use, dis­use and decay from Detroit. Build­ings have a con­tex­tual iden­tity when they are in use, even when they are dete­ri­o­rat­ing. They take on a mea­sure of human intent. When build­ings are dis­man­tled, they lose their iden­tity, becom­ing as ran­dom as any nat­ural encounter. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of use, dis­use and decay creates […]

Early Win­ter Morn­ing When I am ready to bury you I want the weather to coop­er­ate. That would be a sign of god’s grace. I don’t want to be stand­ing by the open grave In a dri­ving rain, The umbrella flut­ter­ing queru­lously over­head; Or star­ing at the crys­tals of a deep frost Bound to the irregular […]