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HEART OF DHARMA
A single snowy egret sitson the lowest branch of a longbarren tree, where hours from nowa thousand birds will arrivefor still another evening and night. He stares at me as I am mindfullyvacuuming, watching carefully. I pause and ask if by chance heis a Buddha and he lifts his long neckand peers around in all…
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THIS YEAR I
It is a day set aside for resolutionsalthough there is no reasonyou cannot make a resolutionany day of your choosing. Perhaps it is a day for thoseresolutions you might nototherwise make, the boldor daunting, more likely a dayfor the resolutions you knowyou will abandon as too hardor simply utterly impractical. This year I have resolved…
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A SIMPLE CHOICE
It is a simple choice, she said,bicycles or a cat. I wanted to tell her thatthere are no simple choicesin the middle of a pandemic,and those that seem that way,to mask or not, to shop or notcan be life or death choices. I thought about the optionsfor a few moments, rememberedthe cats I still mourn…
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MAY DAY
We marched for hours, goingnowhere really, but nowhere wasthe point of the marching so weachieved the goal the Air Force set.We didn’t even think it oddthat they made us shave our heads,so we’d all look like fools,there was a war on and wewere in the military, so wehad already proven that point.We were the smarter…
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NEATNESS COUNTS
Ice, he said, is clearly an inventionof Satan, the ice cube a scaled downversion of that corner of hell of whichno one ever speaks, so little known. And stop and think, we got by wellfor eons without a cube of ice, unlesswith blade we chipped it froma nearby glacier or left water outin the dead…
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IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES
It is all well and good to believethat you will know it when you find it,that it will be so obvious you could not miss it. You’ve been down that road before,and on several occasions were certainthat you’d found it in her face, or hers,in her smile, or her laugh, or oneof their soft touches…
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THE MISSING KEY
You said you’d leave a keyunder the mat on the front stoop,or was it taped atop the light fixturejust to the right of the door jamb top? Well I checked both placesand there was no key to be found,so perhaps it slipped out, got kickedand someone absentmindedly took it and saved it meaning one dayto…
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IF ONLY A BULL
In our family Murphy was a god, and his law was the eleventh commandment. I often wanted to ask at what moment my childhood ended. Had to be before my twelfth birthday, before the day on which I went from greeter at one of my father’s business parties in our oversized family room, to bartender,…
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BLUES
He is for it or he isagainst it, and if you couldpredict the vacillations youcould develop the meansof measuring the flux of sanity. You could as easily graspthe water flowing downriverand by asking select questionsdetermine the next heavy rain, but the odds are goodyou will be outside whenthe deluge begins, andonly its ultimate weightand duration…
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TOO WAY BACK MACHINE
Platform shoes, velourNehru jackets, what the hellwere we thinking, and pinkvelour, seriously, for men. At least it was Hendrix, Byrds,and not Pat Boone and AndyWilliams, almost the deathof music as we know it. Reefers were evil, told us so,and when we figured out it waspot, we begged to differ, frequentlybetween hits on the bong, after…
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an old writer and his words 