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Aging
At The End Of The Fiscal Year
Ten months prior to being eligible for his company’s pension and benefit plan, after almost twenty years, Ben Ross was fired.
June 1982The Terminal Restaurant
The Terminal Restaurant never looked real. Built like a small outdoor building indoors, and with its neon sign over the front door spelling its name in red, it made the place look like a movie set.
January 1982Sunbeams
October 1981What does “car” mean? A car in a showroom, a car heading straight toward me, a car needing constant repair, all have such isolated meanings that the name “car” cannot be said to stand for any one thing. That too is true of Scott or John or Gayle. God is in them only when God is in my mind. Only love can see steadily, consistently. Love makes one thing of all that it sees.
Chapel Hill
An Elegy For Jesse Stroud
There is no precipitating event for this elegy. No anniversary. No birthday. No cause whatever, other than personal need. Jesse Stroud lived, struggled, and died. I do not purposefully vilify nor vindicate. Neither do I celebrate. Certainly not regret.
April 1980April 1980
Three
He abandoned desire. The flowers grew slowly around the hole in his chest. When his lover sighed, they trembled.
March 1980Release
I cannot write how it was. The world shifted me too fast with each event passing before me, inflicting my nerves with flash-bulb rapidity. I was quietly startled at the fresh novelty. Numb still to the fact I was leaving, disbelieving, an embryo in limbo, sins forgiven, the timelessness suddenly and violently meaning something concrete.
February 1979January 1979
Fathers
To let our parents be, to accept them as people, human and therefore imperfect, rather than as gods — that is the challenge.
January 1979Grandparents
A print that someone had jabbed holes where the eyes had been, The Secret Garden where the snow-drops bloomed, a pair of tweezers thrust into a hand
October 1978
