WATERMARK

a poet’s notebook

Established 02004

Photograph

August 8, 2026

Caturday | Cousin Sue & Little Bibs

Today is Sue’s memorial, and I am not there in body, but I and her many many cats and dogs and horses are there in spirit. Continue reading

Aging, Cats, Caturday, Digital Collage, Family, Memory, Personal, Photograph

Caturday
August 2, 2026

Caturday, in memory of Sue Pinkerton

My cousin Sue died last month. We were children together, a shared becoming. Her death is a shock to me, even though we both approach the reasonable time. Continue reading

Aging, Cats, Caturday, Digital Collage, Family, Memory, Personal, Photograph

cat, death, loss
July 26, 2026

Personal Blogging|Blogging for the love of it | in 02026

Is there still a market — that is, are there still readers — for this kind of blog? This kind of hard-to-pin, multi-subject, unpredictable kind of blog? Watermark, for example, was long categorized, initially by me and later by others, as a poetry blog. But it was always a weird combination of poems and essays… Continue reading

About This Site, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blogging, Claude, Photograph, Weblogs, Writing

artificial-intelligence, Blogging, photograph

Ancestral (Artificial )Intelligence

I do not use AI to write. For me, writing is how I think, and I prefer to do it myself. If/when I post anything here that I suspect or know to be AI generated, I will tell you.

I have changed this from Artificial to Ancestral, after Abi Awomosu @ Substack. This medium was made with human history, human thought. All of it, bright and dark. It is ancestral.

Poems

Please do not assume that I am the speaker/ subject of my poems.

In these times of creative nonfiction and fictionalized memoirs, I think of the poem itself as true fiction: it is most likely not factual, but it must be true.

It is likely to be — it is best if it is — a truth I did not know before I wrote, and may not understand even then.

A poem is my way of discovering (dis-covering) what I feel; sometimes, what I think — but it is not necessarily biographical.

Photograph

Caturday | Cousin Sue & Little Bibs

Caturday, in memory of Sue Pinkerton

Personal Blogging|Blogging for the love of it | in 02026