Bruce Williams grew up in Denver  and received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University. For over twenty years he taught writing at Mount San Antonio College.  He has two grown children, Drew, a wine-maker and sometime poet, and Casey a lawyer, like her mother, and Bruce’s late wife, Ellen. Drew and Casey live with their spouses close to each other in Oakland. Bruce still lives on a hill high above San Dimas, California, with his partner, Grace, and two aging Jeeps.  Bruce's poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Solo,  Squaw Valley Review, Ravishing Disunities, and Journal of Poetry Therapy. His first book is The Mojave Road and Other Journeys  (Tebot Bach) which Jim Natal describes as "a journey of inner and outer discovery for both the poet and the reader.”  His second book is titled Like a Relic, or a Child.

Bruce Williams’ “The Mojave Road and Other Journeys” is simply one of the most breathtaking and heartbreaking collections of poetry I’ve read in many years. These poems constitute a sequence of elegies and a folio of meditations upon illness, death and transcendence, and also upon the nature of late, redeeming love—David St. John

ALZHEIMER'S

The words play hide and seek vanishing, or pretending they’re other words. Hugh Houser
becomes Herbert Hoover, say or J. Edgar who lived in Twenty Nine Palms with a rumbling voice
and panned for California gold and secrets.
Foxes avoid towns. Love grasped hard is hate and fear. The examples are made up: substitutes
for real lost events much works: Your room is not your room. Ice in the windows thins on a
warming day. What happens when the words are exhausted? Good whispers in a dialect he has
just made up. You struggle in a mouth that’s not a mouth.
That almost words – coughs, squeaks, clicks,
All translate the same:
Light, Light, Light

EASTER

Against a glowing dark
Proud he once wrote
How many drowned eyes
Saw the rainbow?
Now he wonders if he can.

HAIBUN: March 20, 2015

Spring washes over our valley, bathing us in yellow flowers. The snakes
awake but seldom sing as the old cowboys liked to say, or rattle as we call
their shaken gourd. The singers are easy to spot and kill with hoe or stick.
The silent survive along trail or bush.

Even now the days are turning dry like the margins of lakes and ponds cracked
where there once was water. My heels imitate them. And I sing this song through
the broken egg shells of pain.

We want spring’s change
But stay still quiet, afraid
Come crackling sun, come

© 2016 Bruce Williams