I am a film animator and educator by vocation, poet, lyricist, musician, and photographer by aspiration—in that order, on the days when all four are competing for the same hour. My friends have taken to calling me a polymath who doesn’t math, by which they mean I am a dunderhead once outside the humanities. My reels and abbreviated professional biography on the animation side live at IMDB, so I won’t burn daylight here covering the mechanics of that career, though it surfaces in sidebars throughout the site. What I will say is that there is a through line connecting every medium I work in—visual, aural, lexical—and that through line is filmic story (one constant that infiltrates every substrate of what I do, regardless of the instrument in my hand or the form on the page). It is why I reach for film analogies throughout this site, and why my explications of form and structure borrow freely from narrative vernacular alongside the more traditional lexicon of prosody.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I made the mistake of telling strangers what I did for a living. Without exception, a script the size of a telephone book would materialize and the pitch would begin—waiter, cab driver, random patron at a bar, it made no difference. The story was the entry point into Hollywood, and everyone who came to the city came carrying one. I did not study screenwriting as a medium, but I was already an aspiring playwright, poet, and still wearing an unfinished novel around my neck, so I understood instinctively what stories I would want to develop if the opportunity ever arrived. Film is an attractive medium precisely because it is a polyglot craft—it absorbs all the other arts into its process. But as I will demonstrate throughout this site, the overlap with poetry is more substantial than it might appear: establishing shots and camera maps translate directly into certain compositional strategies, the truck-in and the close-up have their equivalents in tonal and imagistic escalation. What film cannot do—and what poetry can—is oscillate not just between visual metaphors but between states of being, registers of consciousness, ontological conditions that have no image equivalent and cannot be rendered in frame.
The aspiration—the reason this site exists—is to publish my second body of work (which may constitute three books, when ready for publishing), Hallucinations, and this site is first a proving ground for assembling it, analyzing it, and providing along the way what I hope is genuinely useful information on prosody, rhetoric, and form. If the work itself is not to your taste, no harm done; the more mechanical pages dedicated to those subjects were built to stand independently of the poems. As the site develops, I intend to explicate the work of other writers—established and emerging—and to expand the homage section beyond my father, whose invisible presence can be sensed throughout this collection. The site will evolve into a broader examination of formal poetic systems. For now I am sticking to the European classical tradition, but I intend eventually to write and explicate forms from other traditions—the ghazal, the haiku, the pantoum, the tanka—because I believe you cannot honestly explicate a form you have never attempted, however badly. You have to have written a sonnet, even a failed one, to understand what it costs to make one work in a modern context. Tom Brady is a better analyst than someone who only watched the game from the stands, not because he is smarter but because he has lived the internal logic of the system at its highest pressure, and that residue does not leave the body. Attempting these forms, regardless of the outcome, gives you what I think of as the skeleton key for taking them apart in formal analysis—and more importantly, for understanding why they resist being taken apart at all.
As of this writing, I am still finishing the Rhetoric section and have not yet begun the Editing section. You may notice that comments are disabled throughout the site, and that the Home page—which presents the book in chronological order—operates less as a blog and more as a trade paperback laid flat; this is deliberate. The site is not a workshop and was not designed to solicit feedback, though I welcome it through other channels. The book itself was begun in 2000, and the first working draft was copyrighted by 2004; about 30% of the material presented here is newer, written between 2018 and 2026. If you count the transposition of Fountain Street, my first collection, from blank verse into formal verse, the work stretches back to 1988—pre-internet, pre-Google, pre-everything that now makes the provenance of a literary work a subject of anxious scrutiny. To wit, I have always used em dashes (which we called long dashes in my day), and five-dollar words are my coin, as are mixed metaphors.
Over the eight months of building this site—finishing the poems the 2002 manuscript demanded without knowing it yet, and explicating the full collection—I have acquired a thirty-thousand-foot view of my own work that I could not have gotten any other way. There is a quantum difference between doing what is in your wheelhouse and breaking it down for someone who has never been near that wheelhouse. We develop systems, winning formulas, methodologies that operate below the level of conscious articulation—and when pressed to explain them, we discover that we have been articulating the fan belt, maybe the carburetor at best, but never the full engine. Explicating this collection has required dismantling that engine and putting it back together with the parts labeled. There are conceits, governing principles, and structural ideas that run through both Hallucinations and Fountain Street—arrived at through the process of explicating my own work and fusing those findings with pedagogies explored through research. Chief among them is the plasticity and interconnectivity of all the arts. Like synesthesia—tasting a color, smelling a letter—I find no fundamental difference between these conceits expressed lexically, musically, or visually. There are nuances of medium, to be sure, but far more connections than divisions.
THE FOUR PRIMARY CONCEITS
1. The palimpsest layers without erasing.
Every serious piece of art is haunted by what came before it—not merely as influence but as pressure. A palimpsest is a manuscript page scraped clean for reuse, imperfectly: the earlier text was never fully erased, only written over, and what was written over keeps pressing through. Cézanne returned to the same mountain until his winter paintings held the ghost of summer inside them. Eliot’s The Waste Land bleeds the voices of Dante and Shakespeare through a London that doesn’t know they’re there. In this collection, that layering is structural, not decorative—the ghost sonnet running its invisible architecture beneath continuous lineation (meaning the lines run without stanza breaks, the skeleton concealed inside uninterrupted forward motion), the Ghost Blazon cataloguing one subject while a second inventory runs silently beneath it, the persona poems holding two temporal registers—two different moments in time—simultaneously in the same body of language. The earlier inscription never disappears, but rather determines the weight of everything written over it.
2. A thing can be several versions of itself without collapsing into any one of them.
Miyazaki understood this better than most literary theorists: in Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie moves between young girl and old woman and something between the two without the film ever quite telling you which she is. What persists is not the appearance but the identity moving through it. In this collection, a motorcycle is also a man’s nervous system; a woman entering water is also the water’s memory of her; a lock turned in a door opens not a room but an ontological condition—meaning a change not in where you are but in what you fundamentally are. A father driving an empty bus is also Charon ferrying the dead across the river Styx. Nothing resolves into a single reading because the transformation moves across registers—psychological, physical, temporal, mythological—faster than the mind can name the transition, arriving in the body before it reaches language. This skirts ambiguity; it is the structural condition of the work.
3. Recursion folds back through itself.
Recursion means a process that loops back through its own logic—a structure that contains itself, a path that retraces its own steps. Dante’s terza rima—his interlocking three-line stanza form, in which each stanza’s middle line rhymes with the first and last of the next—is not merely a container for a journey; its forward motion depends upon recurrence, each new tercet generated from a rhyme the preceding tercet has already planted. In short, the form advances by reaching backward. This is also what has always drawn me to Escher and Bach: the two hands drawing one another into existence, the Crab Canon moving through itself in opposing directions while remaining in perfect contrapuntal relation. Recursion makes time capable of behaving the same way. An event can appear first as something approaching from the future, pass through the present, and then continue away from us into memory, while each version remains in structural relation to the others—the same event encountered from opposite directions. Grief works the same way: it does not progress; it rotates, finding the same obsessions again and again without relief. In this collection, recursion is everywhere—formally, in the Mirrored Sestina that doubles back through its own terminal words, in the Sestonnet that reopens its own sealed couplets as thresholds, in the villanelle’s refrains that return with gathering and devastating weight. But it is also the deeper rhythm of the book itself: the same father, the same damage, the same Midwestern landscape, the same gap between recognition and change—approached from different altitudes across nine chapters, each pass revealing something the previous one missed, none of them arriving at resolution.
4. Superposition holds contradiction without resolving it.
In quantum mechanics, superposition describes a particle that exists in multiple states simultaneously until the act of observation collapses it into one. But what a work can hold simultaneously and what an observer perceives at any given moment are not necessarily the same thing. The Noh mask makes this distinction visible: the mask itself does not change, but a slight change in the angle of light alters the shadows along the eyes, mouth, and cheekbones, and the same fixed face may appear to grieve, smile, rage, or withdraw. The face has been carved; the possibilities are already present in its architecture, and what shifts between one viewing and the next is the illumination. The Kuleshov effect demonstrates something similar through context: the same expressionless face, juxtaposed with different images, appears to register different emotions. The face remains fixed; the surrounding frame changes what can be seen in it. A poem exists in a comparable relationship with its reader. Each reader brings a different angle of light and a different surrounding frame, illuminating some structures while leaving others in shadow. But the language, like the mask, has already been carved; more than one emotional state can remain latent in the same fixed surface without making interpretation arbitrary.
Precedents makes this principle structural. Its four sestonnets are built as dialectics: two, sometimes four, competing voices occupy the same formal field, inherit one another’s terminal vocabulary, reverse its sequence, and make different claims from substantially the same materials. The argument changes according to who is speaking and where that speaker stands. But at the end of each sestonnet the Acta Iterata changes the terms of the encounter. After the disputants have finished speaking, a final six-line voice enters without taking sides, closer to the neutral mask than to a verdict: non-adjudicative, elliptical, saying only what remains after the mechanism has completed its turn. Lucretia does not tell us who has prevailed in The Forum; Brunetto does not acquit or condemn the speakers of The Seal; Brutus does not resolve The Tribunal; Beatrice closes the circle of The Threshold while explicitly leaving it unfinished. The reader therefore becomes the final source of illumination, and the same six lines may register as accusation, grief, resignation, pity, or indifference according to the light brought to them, the mask fixed while the expression it seems to wear keeps changing.
That principle extends beyond Precedents. When Oscar Wilde speaks from Reading Gaol, when Walt Whitman dictates from Brooklyn in 1856, when Lucifer files a grievance memo and the Holy Ghost responds—two temporal registers and two subjectivities occupy the same linguistic space without either canceling the other. But superposition in this collection is not only a rhetorical device; it is the condition of every poem that holds guilt and love for the same person, damage and gratitude for the same inheritance, the knowledge that the machine was destroying everyone and the longing to have been called into it anyway. These poems are built to hold those states at full voltage simultaneously, without resolving them, because that is the only honest account of what it is actually like.
FORM, STRUCTURE, AND PROCESS
5. The invisible structure is load-bearing.
Every building has walls you cannot see—the ones that hold the roof up, the ones whose removal brings the whole thing down. The ghost sonnet runs fourteen lines of continuous compression with its entire rhetorical skeleton—rhyme scheme, argumentative turn, closing compression—concealed beneath the surface, doing its work without announcing itself. If composed correctly, you feel it before you find it. In this collection, that principle extends beyond the ghost sonnet into every invented form: the Double Form Sonnet’s two competing rhyme engines pulling in opposite directions beneath a surface that looks like a classical sonnet; the Ghost Caudate’s three simultaneous vertical spines writing a hidden three-line judgment inside the visible poem; the Sator Square Sonnet’s rectangular field of rotating pressure—derived from an ancient Latin word square that reads the same in every direction—invisible to any reader who doesn’t know to look. The gap between sensation and recognition is not a flaw, it’s where the poem lives.
6. Every formal decision is epistemological.
Which is to say, it is a decision about what kind of knowing is possible, not just what kind of shape is pleasing; the container changes what can be held. Formal meaning is also relational: a volta does not turn in isolation, it turns relative to what was moving before the turn; a closure does not close by itself, it closes relative to the pressure that made closure necessary. The architecture establishes an expectation, and what the poem fulfills, defers, violates, or transforms within that expectation becomes part of what the poem knows. The villanelle, with its two refrains that return again and again with gathering weight across nineteen lines, does not describe obsession—it enacts it, the form itself unable to let go of its own lines the way the obsessed mind cannot let go of its subject. The sestina, rotating the same six end-words through thirty-nine lines without resolution or escape, does not illustrate trauma—it performs it, forcing the language to keep finding new use for the same wounds without ever arriving at relief. When the emails of a dying man in a flooded house in Wichita arrived already half-structured in terza rima’s interlocking chain—Dante’s form, in which each stanza’s middle line rhymes with the first and last lines of the next, an engine that pulls the reader forward and cannot stop, that can only run out of links—the form was not so much chosen as recognized as the perfect means of telling the story of a man descending into the hell of loneliness and mortality. Terza rima cannot stop, it can only run out of links, and it was the only honest formal structure to express that particular mind in that particular darkness. The form is the argument and they are not separable.
7. The constraint is the pressure, not the cage.
Free verse—poetry without fixed meter or rhyme—is not freedom: it is a different distribution of pressure, less visible, harder to feel. The sonnet’s fourteen lines, the villanelle’s nineteen, the sestina’s thirty-nine: these are not prisons. They are the walls of a pressure cooker, and what they produce under sustained containment is unavailable to the open field. Constraint creates expectation: once a form teaches the ear what must return, where a rhyme should fall, when a line should close, every fulfillment tightens the pattern and every deviation acquires force. A broken rule means little until the poem has made the rule felt; the stability is what gives the fracture its weight. This collection bends inherited forms, reverses them, layers them, and occasionally builds them from scratch—not for novelty, but because the wound required a specific bandage and no existing bandage fit.
8. The wound determines the bandage.
Every invented form in this collection arrived the same way: a poem demanded something the inherited architecture could not provide. The Road to Anandamarga—a poem about a man riding through 1973 Kansas on acid with his three-year-old son on the back—required a reversed sonnet with two simultaneous ghost inventories running beneath it, because that story cannot be told forward. A poem about a man’s predatory orbit through the Russian court required two rhyme engines working against each other in opposite directions, because the counterclockwise pull—the inauspicious rotation, the widdershins motion that every tradition from Hindu circumambulation to European folk cosmology associates with forces working against the natural order—had to be felt in the form itself. The sestonnet emerged from a different kind of failure: an earlier version of The Forum had spent hundreds of lines arguing what the eventual form could demonstrate through reversal alone, each speaker forced to inherit and re-adjudicate the terminal vocabulary of the speaker before him. The form did not abbreviate the argument; it replaced explanation with structure. In short, they are inseparable: the mechanics are the meaning.
9. Influence lives in the substrate, not the surface.
To have learned from Dante is not to write like Dante: it is to understand how terza rima generates forward momentum from obligation—each middle rhyme pulling the next tercet into existence, the chain unable to stop—and to ask what other structures might generate comparable pressure from different premises. The same is true of Arnaut Daniel’s sestina: to inherit the form is to enter a conversation with its constraint, each subsequent use accepting the authority of the original architecture even while testing what else that architecture can be made to do. In this collection, influence is structural before it is atmospheric: Dante’s descent-and-return in the recursion of the Mirrored Sestina; Daniel’s terminal-word recurrence transformed through reversal and recombination; the Greek strophe and antistrophe—the matched metrical units of the ancient choral ode, which advance through a theme and then revisit it from an altered vantage—in the Sestonnet’s mirrored reversal; the Sator Square’s bidirectional containment translated into the rectangular field of a bull ride in Nowata, Oklahoma.
10. Dreams can deliver structure.
This is not romantic mythology about inspiration—it is a structural fact about how a significant portion of this collection arrived, and precisely why I chose the title Hallucinations. Some of these poems came as literal dreams: the entirety of Dante’s speech in The Threshold, the ontological condition that is The Key, deposited whole from the dreaming mind with the form already set and the language already weighted. Others arrived at the hypnopompic threshold—that narrow corridor between dreaming and waking where the dreaming mind still runs but the conscious mind has just enough traction to take notes—the volta snapping into place from a half-waking state, the skeleton doing its work in the dark before the conscious mind knew what it was building. Coleridge, by his own account, woke from an opium dream with Kubla Khan substantially formed and lost much of it to a visitor at the door—finished architecture, already load-bearing, already gone. McCartney heard Yesterday whole in a dream and spent weeks certain he had stolen it, because the experience of receiving a finished thing bears little resemblance to the experience of making one. Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind offers one model for thinking about this experience: language arriving from outside conscious intention, received rather than apparently composed. What the dream delivers, when it delivers anything worth keeping, is not raw material but remembered architecture: the ghost form in its purest state, invisible structure arriving ahead of any conscious intention to build it. The fugue state, the hypnopompic/hypnagogic delivery, the line that arrives whole—none of this requires mysticism. It is the unconscious mind finishing what the conscious mind has been circling, because you cannot receive dictation in a form you haven’t mastered—but you also cannot manufacture by will alone what the dreaming mind will sometimes hand you whole, if you have done the work that earns the dictation.
11. The ghost is load-bearing.
The code that runs your word processor is invisible; it does its work and you read these words. The ghost form makes the same claim on poetry: the architecture you cannot see is the architecture that holds everything up. It establishes expectations the poem may fulfill or violate, carries inherited structures beneath invented ones, and allows one poem to contain another without requiring the reader to locate the seam. Its operation does not depend upon recognition; the pressure precedes the explanation. This is the subtitle of this collection—A System of Ghost Forms, Inherited and Invented—and it is not metaphor. It is a structural description of how these poems are built, how they mean, and why the reader so often feels something arriving before they can name what it is.
LANGUAGE AND SOUND
12. Language operates through contamination.
Julian Jaynes, in one of the most maddening and brilliant books of the twentieth century, offered a model for how metaphor works: the vehicle you use to describe something arrives carrying contraband. He called the thing being described the metaphrand—love, say, something too large and unstable to hold directly—and the vehicle laid over it the metaphier—the rose, a known and sensory object. The rose does not arrive empty, it carries what Jaynes called paraphiers, secondary associations that cling below the level of the explicit: the rose is fragrant, it has thorns, it withers. These become paraphrands—qualities that love acquires by contamination, without the poem having to state them. Love is now capable of wounding, capable of withering, capable of filling a room before it is gone. In this collection, that contamination is the mechanism—the ghost poem pressurizing the visible poem through the same language, the motorcycle parts mapping silently onto the chakra system—the energy centers of the body in Hindu and Buddhist tradition—the blazon of a woman’s body in an acupuncture session carrying beneath it the stations of survival under the Khmer Rouge. The secondary and tertiary meanings are rarely ornamental; they are part of the load-bearing structure.
13. Sound is not ornament—it is the medium.
A poem may be read silently on the page, but it is structured in the ear. Bernard Herrmann built his score for Vertigo on Wagner’s Tristan chord—an unresolved harmonic gesture, a chord that refuses to complete itself and has been generating a sense of longing and suspension in Western listeners since 1865—so that every listener who has absorbed Western music feels a weight they cannot name pressing up through the film from a century before. Music makes the mechanism especially clear in the deceptive cadence: the ear is led toward a resolution it has been trained to expect, only for the harmony to turn elsewhere. The arriving chord is not inherently deceptive; its force comes from the expectation established before it, from the resolution withheld at precisely the moment the ear anticipates its arrival. Poetry works under the same constraints. A rhyme acquires force from the pattern that predicts it, a metrical substitution from the pulse it interrupts, a caesura from the movement it suddenly arrests. A subliminal structure can exert such pressure that it becomes more powerful than the surface carrying it: Eliot’s The Waste Land, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Kubrick’s The Shining and King’s novel of the same name all depend, in different ways, on structures the audience experiences before it fully apprehends them. That is what sound does in a poem when it is working: the pressure of a plosive consonant—the hard stop of a b or p or t against the breath—the sustain of a long vowel, the way a hard stop after a soft passage changes the emotional temperature of a line. In this collection, the prosody—the full system of meter, stress, rhythm, and sonic texture that gives a poem its pulse—is the argument’s nervous system, shaping sense through pressure rather than explanation, through patterned recurrence rather than assertion.
14. What is withheld has mass.
What these poems leave out functions the way Jaynes’s paraphrands function—present by implication, active without being stated—so that the unspoken thing accumulates a kind of pressure the poem never has to name directly. Omission is not empty space; it is part of the frame. What a poem suppresses alters the meaning of what it permits us to see, sometimes giving the absent thing greater gravitational force than anything explicitly named. In The Documentarian, a locked briefcase sits in the corner of a boy’s formation for a year—numbered lock, loaded gun nearby, the answer to every question a shrug the way a monk seals up a tomb. The case begins to open in the closing couplet, click by click—but the opening itself happens offscreen, after the poem has ended, the contents never arriving on the page. In Kettenbiel, a package arrives at the fence from a man who has been hunting a family across the American interior—and it stays sealed the same way the Ark of the Covenant stays sealed, opening offscreen, the force entirely in the arrival: that it knew the door, that it knew the shape of them. Named, the contents become inventory; unnamed, they retain the force of something that reorganizes everyone near it without requiring inspection. A red pulse beat, and silence did the rest. There is an iniquity in The Vow pressed against but never named, an unnamed thing in Two Rosaries that both the rosary and the mala—the Hindu and Buddhist prayer bead—were counting toward but that naming would reduce. Truth is weighted, edged, capable of incision, and the governing editorial principle of this collection came from the man it is largely about, my father: there is too much truth in this; any hand should hesitate to dilute it.
INHERITANCE AND THE SELF
15. Damage transmits through absence, not speech.
The grandfather who served aboard the USS Indianapolis years before the Navy cruiser was torpedoed in 1945, its survivors spending four days in shark-infested water before rescue—and who later died drunk on a rock at a family picnic. The uncle who answered the door with a loaded gun and Paint It Black on eternal repeat. The father who went from Green Beret to commune-builder to graveyard shift at a molybdenum mine. None of them explained what happened; they passed it forward through silence—through early rising and banked fires, through what was never said and never named. Silence is not containment; it is compression. As Robert Bly so elegantly expressed in Iron John, weight does not dissipate; it passes forward, and this collection is in large part the record of a man trying to read the burden he was handed and discovering that reading it changes nothing about the fact of having received it.
16. The speaker does not escape the system he or she describes.
The adult at elevation—with the long view finally available, the genealogy of damage visible as a system rather than a sequence of incidents—looks back and watches the formation installed in childhood running continuously, uninterrupted, right up to the present moment. The recognition does nothing to interrupt it; there is no privileged altitude from which seeing the machinery places the observer outside it. Self-knowledge is another position within the system, not an escape from it, and it keeps accumulating without ever once being enough to make him stop. That condition runs through the High Ground chapter in particular, through Stone Prairie’s lattice of consequence hardening around a life until it becomes indistinguishable from the life itself, through the speaker of Grassy Bald observing solipsism—the condition of being sealed inside one’s own perception, unable to receive the world as it actually is—from the outside without being exempt from his own variety of it, mordancy and self-exposure collapsing into a single gesture.
17. The body is an archive.
The final site where violence and history land is never abstract—it is the flesh. The traditional blazon moves up or down the body of the beloved, cataloging feature by feature until the aggregate becomes a portrait, an act of praise built from inventory. This collection often performs the same movement in reverse: the catalog remains, but what it accumulates is not adoration—it is testimony. The colon surgically reduced by amoebic dysentery contracted in covert operations. The bones broken in a fall from a lift that ended a career and began a forty-year contraction. The cartilage that has learned it cannot heal along the talus of the Missouri Basin. Each part, inventoried, becomes an archive of what the body survived, as Prometheus’s liver, torn out and regenerated nightly, becomes the site where punishment is made legible—the organ itself turned into a record of the sentence. Whatever the culture, the army, the family system did is stored in posture and grip and the particular way a man holds himself when he is about to speak. Named part by part, the body becomes an offering, each section a fragment of sacrifice standing in for the whole man, damage transfigured into a kind of apotheosis he never asked for. The body in these poems is never merely a body; it is the evidence.
MYTH, LANDSCAPE, AND THE SACRED
18. Myth is weather, not metaphor.
The mythological and ritual systems running through this collection—Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Dante’s cosmology, the chakras, the Bardo Thodol, the ofrenda—are not puzzles the reader must solve in order to enter the poems. They operate beneath the surface, supplying structure, pressure, and resonance whether their sources are recognized or not. In Eight Seconds in Nowata, dust becomes a kind of weather all men have felt before and, a few lines later, fear becomes atmosphere: the private condition becoming the medium through which the entire scene is experienced. Myth operates similarly. In Two Rosaries, the number 108 connects the Vedic mala to astronomical correspondences between the moon and the earth. Knowing those correspondences changes what can be seen in the poem, but not what can be felt. Myth provides the underlying weather; recognition merely tells the reader why the air feels the way it does.
19. The father is a mythic co-presence, not a character.
He does not appear in these poems the way characters appear in fiction—arriving, doing things, departing. He is present the way weather is present, governing the atmosphere of the collection whether named or not. Green Beret, commune-builder, Climax miner, dissertation writer, Ananda Marga practitioner, co-author of Fountain Street: all of these are the same man, and none of them is the whole man, and the collection is the place where all of his simultaneous versions occupy the same space without being asked to resolve into a single biography. He is already ash and already present, the ghost the whole system is built to hold.
20. The American landscape is cosmological, not setting.
Cosmological meaning these landscapes function the way ancient peoples understood the cosmos—not as backdrop but as the total explanatory framework for existence, the place where the human drama acquires its largest possible scale. The gravel barrens leading mostly nowhere; the graveyard shift at a molybdenum mine eleven thousand feet up in the Colorado Rockies; Moses Lake at dawn with a crow angling over Washington, indifferent to everything the speaker is carrying; Dead Man’s Slide in the Cascades where the speaker brings the ash of his own catastrophes to scatter along the Iron Goat Trail. These places are the cosmological terrain of the collection—doing what Olympus did for the Greeks, what the underworld did for Dante, holding the mythology the culture needs but will not admit it needs, the darkling plain on which all of it, finally, is adjudicated.
21. Water is liturgical, not decorative.
Liturgical meaning ritualistic, ceremonial, belonging to the formal grammar of the sacred—not holy water specifically but water as the element that every tradition has reached for when it needs to mark transformation. It runs through this work the way it runs through the world’s mythologies—as the oldest cleansing agent and the oldest destroyer simultaneously. But my relationship with water precedes most of these poems. Water embodies much of why I became an animator in the first place. It is pure in the sense that it requires no invention: it is implicit in the world and in our own bodies, yet almost nothing visible is more mutable. A body maintains its shape from moment to moment; water does not. It folds, breaks, gathers, disperses, reflects, distorts, evaporates, freezes, and reforms, changing shape from second to second while remaining entirely itself. In that sense it behaves less like the body than like the mind—thought and feeling continually changing form without necessarily changing substance.
Heraclitus first gave that intuition language: the river as the place where identity and change cease to be opposites. Leonardo gave it motion, studying water not as a symbol but as a physical intelligence—eddies, vortices, currents, collisions, the temporary forms produced when one force encounters another. Winslow Homer gave it weight and danger, the human figure measured against something vastly more powerful and indifferent. Hokusai went further still, stylizing water until observation became grammar: the wave reduced to curves, hooks, foam, repetition, and rhythm without ceasing for an instant to feel like water. Traditional animation demands a similar transformation. To animate water convincingly, observation is not enough; eventually you have to internalize its behavior so completely that you stop drawing an object called water and begin thinking through its motion. You become it, at least for the duration of the sequence. Stylization is ex post facto maneuvering, possible only after you’ve become the force itself, and it is in this same way that I employ water in the poems.
In Baptism, a young man has no choice but to enter the frozen water; in Big Hill, water becomes an instrument of healing; in The Surface Holds, the body enters, disturbs the surface, and leaves it to close again; in The Song of Heraclitus, water makes change itself visible. And in Honeymoon, the Arno breaks its banks and carries Magdalene downstream behind Cimabue’s yellow Jesus and Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. Water in these poems may cleanse, wound, heal, erase, carry, reflect, or destroy, but its deepest property is transformation without loss of identity. It is never merely scenery; it is the medium through which something passes from one state into another.
ELEGY AND GRIEF
22. Elegy and eulogy run simultaneously.
The Aztecs did not only mourn their dead; they fed them. The Ofrenda is not a monument erected against forgetting but a table set for a guest who has changed address. The elegies in this collection—for the father, for Troy Gustafson, for Eric Swangstu, for Uncle Don and Jerry, for the six people carried to Dead Man’s Slide in a single pre-pandemic year—operate on the same principle: the poem does not mourn so much as release, the living completing a transfer the dead have already begun. The elegy that inflates absence into cosmology—that turns a father’s death into a theological statement, a friend’s into a universal truth—has already betrayed the subject. The terrain may carry meaning, but it cannot be made to carry more than the dead themselves gave it. The ash is personal before it is anything else, and the elegiac poems earn the larger resonance only by refusing to reach for it.
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