From early on I have been obsessed with words, poetry especially. My heroes are poets and writers. My favorite poets- Walt Whitman, e.e. Cummings, Philip Levine, T.S. Elliot, Arthur Rimbaud inspire me to attempt poetry. Daily life without the beauty of imagination, and the music of poetry is drab indeed. Poets offer a call to love, adventure, tragedy, heroics that I cannot resist. Call me old-fashioned-I'm clinging to the magic of words and imagination.

In Memory of my grandmother, Virginia Lee Nelson, with love.

Nesting in a deep bed, we listened to our grandmother and the history of each piece of furniture resting in the old house,
the childrens' refinished dressers, antique mirrors, the high walnut beds, a tub with heavy lion feet,
the thick carpets and the dark hallways, rooms barely dressed with reminders of the children who belonged in them.

The house is quiet now except for the Alabama hymn of our grandmother and her memory of stealing ice cream her parents couldn't afford and the gasping for breath costing her a childhood full of salves and tents of steam

until her mother and aunts gathered the family, leaving the wet river bottom to a beach Model T's would race on long before a concrete speedway was thought of

where there were dances on wooden planks and bathing beauty contests at the Main street pier

and long boards for tall skinny young men who would marry young girls, who would promise to become everything and bring us into the world.