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A PLACE OF MONOLOGUES
The cemetery is a place of monologues, family histories laid bare, admissions, secrets long kept hidden finally revealed You must listen carefully, for the voices speak only in hushed tones, befitting both place and circumstance. There is no dialog, no riposte, no response for in this place, that would be put of place, censorious, Thy…
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TIME OUT
You could feel the tears embedded in the email “We didn’t know she had only three years.” She is 84 and failing in so many small ways that the prognosis comes with great pain, but barely shock save for its delivery. So we cherish the remaining days and cast the estimate aside.
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HIGHER ORDER
Among certain species of spider at the moment of arachnidal orgasm the female devours her mate for the protection of the young. The lion stalks his prey, then leaps tearing flesh to sate a hunger born of the endless sun beating down on the grassy plain. It is left to man to hunt for trophy,…
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FOOTHILL ROAD
In the hills that rise gently from the concrete valley two hawks play childlike, rising, falling in gentle circles, grazing the redwoods that reach up to stroke their breasts. To a visitor from the East New York, Tokyo there is awe at the hawks’ grace, slicing the sky into cloudy ribbons but there is no…
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CHARLAP
Bill places his fingers on the keyboard, nods to the drummer and bassist. God waves his hands, demands heavenly silence and unsurprisingly to you, no one argues the point. Even Evans, sitting at God’s feet, smiles and says “it’s so nice to know our legacy is safe,” and turning to Blakey, adds “Ain’t that so…
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EPISTLES
In dreams I write letters to dead heroes beginning each Dear __________: I apologize for the intrusion but in your next life will you do the same, give up the desk in the patent office for dreams of brothers twins, one moving one fixed, stand before a jury, no testament to the Lower East Side.…
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ACT IV
He knew he should not have brought the gun. He hated guns, they served no purpose in his world of words. He wanted to look at it, to stare at it, really. He thought that if he did so he might be better able to write about the senselessness of the world in which he…
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PASSING
He has been gone over a year and they need to erect the headstone before the first hard freeze, but it has rained for several days and the ground is too soft. Although I can still hear his cackling laugh he lingers less and his smell is slowly fading from the old bomber jacket. First…
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SLAINTE
It is just that sort of summer day when the sparse clouds crawl ever more slowly across the city, peering down, as if wishing they could end their journey, knowing this won’t happen. On the fields of Falkirk and Culloden Moor stained with the blood of ancestors who, only now, claim me as one of…
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THE BLINK
In the elemental scheme of things we humans are, at best, middling. We are minute in the scale of the universe, our time not even a glimmer, and as we age, time contracts, but only in the shortening forward direction. But pity the poor hydrogen-7 isotope whose life is likely over in 30 yactoseconds, absorbing…
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an old writer and his words 