I am most at home when I am writing poetry. In those moments, my attention bends toward the sacred—overflowing with awe and marvel, tangled in confusion and wonder, weighted by deep sorrow and lifted by transcendent joy. My mind’s eye lingers on the intricate textures of a single instant, while my voice searches through our language, gently turning each word in my hands until it glints with enough truth to carry me—not fully back to that experience—but somewhere near its light.

Here in the rural beauty of New York’s Finger Lakes, my spirit wakes to the hymn of the land: lakes wide as memory and quiet as prayer; hills shaped by the patient hands of glaciers; farm fields stitched across the horizon; and the abundant host of creation—herons tracing silver arcs over still water, falcons braiding shadows in the sky, trillium and bluebells ringing the woodland floor, maples and oaks standing as old witnesses, fox slipping between the hedgerows, chipmunks vanishing into stone walls.

These poems rise from such soil and seasons, from watchful hours and wandering paths. I offer them to you:

Poems from “Beneath the Same Slow Sky“

• In Quest of a Peach
• The Difficulty of Low Places
• Nocturnal Reverie
• Rendering the Canvas
• My Heart, My Altar, and This Mess