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The Smell Of Fatigue
Life has always been as hard as the soles of my father’s feet. Like the callused hand my face melts into. He holds it like the cantaloupe before a fruit salad. Like life before America. Before it’s sliced, devoured, consumed.
June 2022Love And Death Among The Molluscs
An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger.
May 2022Market Street
The sea of people looked like a great heartbroken circus, wild living art, motley and stylish, old and young, lots of Buddhists, people from unions and churches and temples, punks and rabbis and aging hippies and nuns and veterans — God, I love the Democratic Party — strewn together on the asphalt lawn of Market Street.
April 2022Riding Out At Evening
At dusk, everything blurs and softens. / From here out over the long valley, / the fields and hills pull up / the first slight sheets of evening, / as, over the next hour, / heavier, darker ones will follow.
March 2022
Memory: Short-Term Loss, Long-Term Gain
I am not so sure it is “we” who look back. The commemorating imagination seems to come alive on its own. We are not the sole instigators of remembering; memory seems to push itself on us.
February 2022Reading From The Desert Fathers At The Laundromat
A certain brother went to Abbot Moses and asked him for a good word. And the elder said to him: Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
January 2022Soybeans
Soybeans look like a foot of water on the field in April / When you’re ready to plant and can’t get in
December 2021Miracle Fair
One of many miracles: / a small and airy cloud / is able to upstage the massive moon.
November 2021
from The Grapes Of Wrath
What happened to the folks in that car? Did they walk? Where are they? Where does the courage come from? Where does the terrible faith come from?
October 2021Refugees, Late Summer Night
Out there, in the dark, they could have been / anyone: refugees from Rwanda, slaves pushing north. / Palestinians, Romani, Armenians, Jews. . . . / The lights of Tijuana, that yellow haze to the west, /could have been Melos, Cracow, Quang Ngai. . . .
September 2021
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