Waiting, with eagerness and anxiousness in equal measure, for the final round of changes my editor suggests for upcoming novel PUSHING THE RIVER.

In the meantime, I completely surprised myself by writing the first poem I have written in, oh, I think about forty years.

Untitled

These are not the stories

Not the ones I want to tell you

Your skin, the perfect roughness of your taut hands

It is these things that make me need different stories to tell you

Ones that will match your hands

My stories, the ones that are really mine

Are for aching skin, crumbling skin

The tales that are me

fit with hands that have held

Neither newness, nor wonder

photo by Michelle Cardozo