The boy – 7 – walks by the Brooklyn luncheonette and the jukebox plays The night is like a lovely tune beware my foolish heart With the years the melody returns And always out of nowhere A love affair begins and...
Read MoreI switch off the ballgame at it’s turning point Move to the comedy of Saturday Night Live Let the game end without me There’s too much life there When I turn back, if my team has won There is no joy, only relief Should my team...
Read More“The countries we long for occupy a far larger place in our actual life, at any given moment, than the ordinary country we happen to be in.” Marcel Proust He was embarking on a journey to a faraway place, an undiscoverable...
Read MoreI’m carving out an effigy of Forgetfulness grasping mangled ledgers of memory. Look how it shuffles screens, kinks files: larceny of channeled retention from unmuscled thresholds and honed lingo. Its intrusions inhabit the...
Read MoreAfter Dad’d spur, I was sure to bray: seasonal’d torture, splintered holidays, angered, soured, wound, baked—geothermal’d! Pending over my shoulder, poised, contained, his roused snout. Eruption’s not seeming a sensible...
Read MoreYou must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter. —Henry David Thoreau The summit staged a glimpse. The West became a canvas. When I’m dispersed, it draws back. That chalked terrain: peaks pleated, engraved, cocked-...
Read MoreI want to write about Viktor Ullmann, but don’t know how without inventing new language. No words in the dictionary are sufficient to describe or portray the unspeakable and monstrous moment when he was twenty-one and...
Read MoreHave you nothing to say? I don’t believe the dangling cigarette interferes with thought or speech. For the last two hours you’ve looked at every item in the tool department of Lowe’s, and I have followed behind...
Read MoreI drift into the bar as if lost, and in some ways I am. It’s been four years since I’ve been here. Renovations have made it a less seedy place to down a Jack and Coke. There are now colored globes at intermittent...
Read MoreCumulus clouds drifted past a pale sun, a chilly day for swimming, but I couldn’t resist traveling to the lake for a good soaking. I yearned for the solace I’d find there. I invited my nine-year-old granddaughter, Annie, to join...
Read MoreI write often to you. Looking at my handwriting, I admit my letters look like the meager scratches I made in the third grade, and that year seems closer than the distance between us. I write that I miss your homemade gorditas....
Read MoreMy hands held her face as she died, and her name changed becoming as unknowable as the language used to give it life. I remember her brown hair sprinkled with grey. It seemed to sag when she left me. I don’t know how God chose...
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