This book of poems presents an elderly man's interior journey during the extended year of Covid-19. Living with a life-ending diagnosis, he faces the unavoidable in a poetry that does not shun the real. With seriousness and humor, he writes in the poem, El Paso County, that it is "better to die / of what now ails me / than to take on / another passenger / thumbing for a ride".
In the closing poem, Buttonbush, the poet alluded to perennial wisdom when he voices, without any "You reach for me / with your thousand arms / will not let me escape / you needle-touch me / awaken me / anchor me in your blinding light". The poet speaks to the shared humanity of all spiritual traditions.