The Judging of Lord Wolf — Of all the poems I’ve written, this is my favorite. It describes an encounter between you and a wolf on a frozen night in the wilderness. It still gives me a shiver every time I read through it, lo these many years later. Originally published in a semi-private, in-class collection called Diversions in the spring of 1996, it was recently seen in print once again as, uh, filler in the program book for Conifur 2001.

Winter’s Starlight — My old poetry instructor once challeneged us to write a poem with a specific rhyme and number of syllables to each line. This is the dubious result. Perhaps a little strained in places, but better than the original scramble. “Winter Starlight” was the name of a character I knew on an old White Wolf game called CitadelMUSH; she was an albino werewolf of the Children of Gaia and the inspiration for my own Werewolf character some years later.

Dream of the Dolphin — I wrote this on the spot in answer to a truth-or-dare question about what it was I respected the most. I don’t recall the exact wording of the question, but my answer said something about how you had to admire/respect the only organism on planet Earth with a higher brain-to-body mass ratio than humans. I like how Douglas Adams put it: “It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Watchers — It may be short and simple, but I think this poem makes the point (better than the others in some respects) that despite everything we know, we often lose touch with ourselves and our path in life. A few years ago (1997) when the snow was really coming down in the middle of the night, I opened the window before going to sleep and watched it fall for a bit. As I gazed, I heard a solitary owl across the street among the baren branches of the forest, calling softly: “Whowho... who... who....” It captured my attention for many minutes because I had never heard one before. I tore myswlf away and wrote this.