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Making A Difference

Boxing lessons, frozen puddles, individualized sandwiches

Sunbeams

If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.

Elizabeth Janeway

April 2000

When I’ve fallen under the spell, when I’m convinced that God doesn’t exist, that love is an illusion, how do I remind myself I’m profoundly mistaken — not just a little wrong, but as wrong as I can be? As wrong as Rush Limbaugh. As wrong as the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Her, Rising

Yes, there are the memories / like little phylacteries strapped to our minds, / and there are the ways we know our dead / have worked inside us

January 2000

Fear is nearby. God seems impossibly distant. Fear comforts me in a voice that’s so familiar. God’s voice comes to me as the barest whisper. I’m rarely quiet enough to hear it.

Sunbeams

Tell me what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

The Beautiful Woman And The Fear Of God

I am convinced, however, that the sexual problems of many middle-aged men are the symptoms of a spiritual crisis that has nothing to do with sex. Men are rummaging around in their small rooms looking for the solution — younger women, better gadgets, subtler techniques — when the real answer is outside the room altogether. It is a matter of discovering what sexual energy really is, something like what Roger Corless meant when he said that anything you do with your deepest energy is a sexual act. It is a matter not of looking for sex in new places but of seeing that sex is everywhere.

This Moment In Time In Brooklyn

A cabby picks me up at the cabstand at La Guardia Airport, but not before I’m handed a bright yellow brochure titled Taxi Information. In three languages, the brochure lists sample fares from the airport to the city’s five boroughs. There’s also space to record the driver’s medallion and license numbers if the cabby is rude or refuses to go to a particular neighborhood — the South Bronx, for example.

Oh

Selected Poems