In a museum the other day I saw an orrery from the time of Jefferson and Franklin. It was very wrong. Those tiny orbs arching out from the sun’s center were not only disproportionate to each others relative size but they were not even close to the correct order of[…]
The wind is in conspiracy with the new leaves. Only yesterday these were budless, bony statues motionless, framing my window box. Now a dancing pointillism mesmerizes me. The light fluctuates in proportion to the clouds. On the trunk a small woodpecker puffs its downy belly against the scaly bark. Among[…]
In youth there is urgency, in the blood, pounding in your temples, when desire is only inches and an instant away. It’s like falling. You can no longer catch yourself. You can’t even look back, the inevitable screaming up at you, the consequences racing down behind. After youth, when urgency[…]
I put out my arm, give him a steady handhold as we descend the icy stairs. His left foot descends one step then his right foot descends one step. I wait for each to alight. I am still thinking of how very thin he was within my hug. “The pace[…]
The shrouded woodland seems invaded by the seeping mist leaving not even an acre within my gaze. Closely packed at attention each tree in the barren stand stares down to the fallen which lie parallel, each to each, submerged beneath the caustic fog, half awash in flares of the retreating[…]
Cool-Not Cool. Just think of all we have suffered to be cool or not to be cool? All the broken hearts- all the broken bones- all the broken spirits- all the damaged livers- all the butchered psyches- all the brain cells sacrificed at the altar of Cool-Not Cool. I used[…]
Late summer and the river has run dry in its bed. Cracked like lips with fever, drawn taut under the indifferent sky a void has risen imperceptibly above the banks, as the vapors of the afternoon dance off, whirling around into it like stellar gases collapsing on a black hole.[…]
The discussion concerned membranes, lesions, reconstruction and even skin grafts. I never realized as a child how important an organ my skin was. Brain, heart, lung, liver got all the attention. All I needed to do was eat right. Who knew that all these years later it would be hours[…]
“She always put her mouth where her money was, but, Hell, that was how her Mother used to needle her!” His voice seemed to cloud over somehow- from within- maybe it wasn’t only her Mom he was remembering. His wet hands were roughly scraping at his gnarled scruff of a[…]
Somehow they just seem to appear, in the mornings, draped over all the senses, clouding perceptions, wearing on joints and synapses. They hang across our lives in intricate networks as complicated and intertwined as vineyards in the Autumn. As if made of steel, they are binding, constricting and crushing inward[…]