Alder and Salmon

The comfort of smolder tendrils over red flesh— a salmon, deboned and fileted and arranged atop a steel rack, gradually, ardently, inflames. The poet chooses alder wood fresh from the edge of Alsop Pond, the one the tree’s been sucking as it spills its yellow catkins into April’s rain. Cut into kindling, the timber bleeds […]

Mary’s New Era

                   “That’s life, isn’t it? Getting past the unexpected,                      and perhaps learning from it.”                     —The Dowager Countess, Downton Abbey   Everyone got what they wanted, Mary notes […]