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IN DREAMS
Late in the night a train rolled by through the city, a few miles down the hill from here, its horn muted but still required at crossings. I know it appeared in my dreams, but I cannot tell if it was as the heron in flight over the lake, or the long bearded hiker with…
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SOZAN’S FOUR DON’TS 鐵笛倒吹 九十二
You may seek to follow the path of the dove – a fool knows many roads. You may wrap yourself in fine linen – an infant wears only his skin, and knows this moment is already gone. Think long before you speak of how to walk along the path, of where it leads. The baby…
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TWO SEASONS (CINQUAIN)
It came without warning and much to our surpise settled in for a long visit — Summer Winter’s slow departure leaves us frozen in rage at Spring’s reluctance to appear — again
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CORSO
When my back was turned, Corso slipped away somewhere in Wisconsin silently, without protest carried off by Charon across a gasoline river. There was no bomb to announce his departure, no Queens orphanage stopped frozen in a silent moment. In the small park at the north end of Salt Lake City no one lifted a…
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FROM BEYOND
My grandmother speaks to me from time to time, in a voice that sounds remarkably like my own, but the dead borrow voices, it is so much easier than exercising their own, and there is so little need for words once they leave. She hasn’t changed all that much, still opinionated, still ready to have…
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ERATO’S NIGHTMARE
That one summer I worked in the plant I could hear them whisper in the break room, with its always empty Coke machine. They’d get real quiet when I came in some would nod a hello and quickly leave. At first I thought it was because I was only there for the summer, but once,…
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AS THE CROW FLIES
Leaving the fields of the countryside for the city, it is the birds that tell you when the invisible boundary has been crossed. There are usually signs along the roads bolted to steel poles but the birds know better. In the country, birds sing long arias to the day, to cornstalks making the slow green…
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ERGO COGITO
She says she is certain she exists, much as she is certain he exists as well. He says, she thinks she exists, thinks he does as well. Descartes, he says, was…
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DISCOVERY
In a small storefront, in an older neighborhood of the city, I found it. Sepia coated with a fine sheen of dust and neglect, it lay on the table amid a stack of others, as though a leaf of phyllo in a poorly made stack fresh from the oven. I knew it as I looked…
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OH, UNSWEET ROSE
There are days when nothing less than a full blown cliche will suffice, and any attempt at brevity will result in an utter and total failure and wit will mourn it soul. You might as well spit in the wind, because you simply cannot swim against that tide, and it and time will never wait…
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an old writer and his words 