I copy a Yeats poem, line by line.

It’s been a couple of weeks! I’m tired. The reading at the beautiful new bookstore, Artemis, was great but exhausting, not that I didn’t have plenty of help (thank you so much, all of you) but it’s th...

A man from a recent Zoom group got in touch with me to ask if I would be interested in having his help in marketing The End-of-the-Line Club. I looked him up. He retired from fifty years in advertis...

Oh dear, do I throw together a Wobbly today, having had no time to write it ahead of time, or do I skip it? I’ll do it, regardless, and hope you’ll forgive me if it’s less coherent. That’s the pract...

I’m sending this now because I can’t write to you on Wednesday.  I will be lying in a hospital bed, full of drugs, and being fed and looked after. Who doesn’t, in spite of the awfulness of surger...

What a terrible time for our democracy. We’re walking on ice and slipping every minute.

It was snowy, like now, only more so.

The snow keeps coming and coming. It’s quite lovely from in here, with all our high windows. Across from the window of my study, a guy is snowblowing the third floor balcony, snow feathering out like ...

What it looks like here on the ground floor, just before Christmas—bushes all covered with white lights that glow through our windows all night. Not a problem. We close our bedroom blinds, and Ollie t...

What would I do without writing? Maybe I’d knit, or paint. Maybe, if my back were better, I’d cross-country ski. Maybe I’d cook. Well, I can rule that one out right away. I can do it, I’m pretty good ...

As I open this blank page, AI recommends that I might want to write a bedtime story for an 8- year-old about dinosaurs; or I might want to create a low-budget three-day trip to Paris; or create a summ...

That’s it. I’m exhausted. I’m so exhausted (add to this my back pain) I’m not planning any more readings for a while. But the book launch was wonderful! A large room full of people! I should have had ...

When he wanted to jump. When maybe he did jump.

One friend’s wife is dying and is already gone in a sense with vascular dementia. Another has just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Another’s husband is very slowly giving way to dementia. My back ...

I INTERVIEW MYSELF ABOUT MY NEW BOOK, THE END OF THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE: Q:  I’m so happy to spend this time with you, Fleda, to talk about your new book! I’m a great fan. I’ve read every wo...

An old poem I'd forgotten about.

But that's how it is when you're young.

Staying engaged can apply to writing, to poetry, as well as to the political situation. You’d think you couldn’t help it, as a writer, but there are deeper levels of being engaged. Some of them involv...

A free poem from my new book. Now would you order the book?

My back’s been painful all summer. Finally, after MRI and x-rays, the source has been identified, cortisone injected last Thursday, and I’m feeling much better. For now at least. But still, there’s li...

Our 34th anniversary was Saturday. Who would’ve thought? We’ve had this many good years together! I don’t know how it would be, two poets living and working together. It could be great, helping each...

A Happy Thing

Hot! We now have ceiling fans in every room of the two cottages, minus one, which will happen as soon as the electrician can get to it. And, with whatever’s going on with my hip, I can’t swim or even ...

Listening to a lone bird

A luminous new perspective on aging, science, and the tender strangeness of being alive. What does it mean to exist in a universe that refuses to stay still? In The End of the Clockwork Universe, Fled...

Dear friends, I’m taking time off. Everyone needs time off, I’d say. In the meantime, here’s a little prose poem for you.

A luminous new perspective on aging, science, and the tender strangeness of being alive. What does it mean to exist in a universe that refuses to stay still? In The End of the Clockwork Universe, Fled...

We got our new dock. I’ll forever miss the wooden one, but it was rotting. We were, I’m pretty sure, the last holdouts on the lake to ask the dock people to install and take out a heavy  4’ woode...

A poem from Flying Through a Hole in the Storm

My retirement community, some of us, took a bus trip to Detroit. It’s not so far away, a first try at trips out of town sponsored by the “club,” as we’re called. After having lived on the east coast f...

I wish I could, today. It's cold and wet.

A chapbook is a funny thing. So tiny, sometimes it seems embarrassingly barely more than a flyer. Yet it has those words, those poems, each one worked over and over. Little jewels, you would say, if y...

A poem from "No Need of Sympathy"

I didn’t have time to get a Wobbly together this week, so I am going to give you the little tidbits I write, kind of like a diary, when I don’t have anything going and just need to keep at it anyway. ...

What love is, to a swan.

So, you’ve just gotten my little chapbook, Doctor of the World. You’ve come to expect a certain kind of poem from me and now this! You’re not used to reading poetry, anyway, but you’re my friend, or...

I write this on my uncle Richmond’s 100th birthday. He was down in the gym a couple of days ago, thinking he’d do a little workout before dinner. He loves using the machines. This time he sprained his...

a momento from Chemo

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Lutheran pastor and theologian who was part of a plot to kill Hitler. Years ago I read The Cost of Discipleship , but thought now I might read his biography to learn fr...

Sometimes I don’t have anything to say. The disintegration of our rules, our laws, our country’s reputation feels crushing. Does it take mental leisure to be creative? Maybe there needs to be somethin...

Jerry has had an exacerbation/ exasperation of COPD, two trips to Urgent Care. This will not go away, but will get better in between attacks, one hopes. I have moved my almost 100-year-old uncle into ...

Ever since Kelly and I were at the Whitney Museum in New York a few weeks ago, I’ve been mulling over the question of what art is. I am beginning to feel that all contemporary art thinks its job is to...