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MOURNING ASCENDANT
When they lowered my grandmother’s casket into the sodden earth, there wasn’t a dry eye or shoulder, or leg around. Sophie would have gotten a good laugh, her children always too busy for a visit getting soaked to the skin, in a cold, windy downpour, all but me, the one she chose to conduct the…
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REFLECTING ON THE HARBOR
On the anniversary of the start of a war one feels almost compelled to speak to its horrors, its cause, its effect. But we live in an age where wars are plentiful, when peace is the exception and war seems to loom around every corner. So on this anniversary I watch the snowy egret stare…
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A SIMPLE QUESTION
A woman walks up to me and asks, “can you juggle the salt and pepper shakers?” but I know what she really wants is for me to bind her wounds and drag the sun quickly from the horizon. I pick up two apples and a plum but the plum falls to the floor and rolls…
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CONTEMPLATING
She stands on the bridge and stares down into the slowly flowing river. She wonders what it might feel like to climb the railing and pushing off, gain flight. The river would welcome her, enfold her, carry her to its heart. She will not leap this day just as she did not the day before,…
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DREAM
She took the flower, placed it gently, arranged just so, between the pages of the giant tome, and closed the book setting it carefully back on the shelf where it would remain until someone, seeing its leathered spine might pull it out, blow off the dust and open to that page, and look into her…
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THIRD EYE, NEEDING GLASSES
You ask me what is the first thing I can remember, and seem surprised when I tell you memory is much like a Buddhist river, never the same twice. Memory is a stage and I am one to forget my lines, today it’s the window in the back of a Miami Beach bus amazed at…
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RETURN FROM NINEVAH
Jonah, what color is the sun at dawn? Black as the night preceding it Jonah, what is the odor of spring? That of rotting rincinus Jonah, what shall we say to a crying baby? The gates of Ninevah will be…
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GABRIEL, AT HOME IN OHIO
I saw an angel settle slowly over Akron dancing in the smoke rising out of the stacks of the ancient plant. It flitted, darting in and out of the gray haze, one moment she, the next he, and as the sun settled slowly down, for an instant no more than a cherub. It was not,…
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AND WHAT IS LEFT BEHIND
She calls them around her bedside but they stand back fearful of the withered ghost hovering on the sheets, until one, eldest, touches her extended hand with a finger as if passed through a flame. I will be leaving soon she tells them, if not tomorrow then a day later and I will take the…
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SIGNS OF AGE
1. I wrote a note to remind me to remind you of that thing you didn’t want to forget, but I can’t remember where I put it. Have you seen it? 2. I am rapidly approaching that point when counting black hairs on my head is easier then counting years. 3. This year I finally…
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an old writer and his words 