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LA MER
Next week we will walk along the beach and periodically stare out on the ocean. The waves will wash in and out, and one will look much like the last and the next. If we get out early enough, perhaps we will sit outside a café across the road from the beach and drink our…
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CHILD OF GHOSTS
I am a child of ghosts, my parents adopted and birth, all visit me, but only in my dreams, for ghosts prefer the reality that dreams allow. Some say that dreams are not real, but they live in the mind as do every other reality I experience each day, my senses merely inexact lenses for…
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SOMETHING
There is something gentle about her, a softness, as though she arrived on a gentle breeze, was present before you felt her on the back of your neck, a smile that cast your shadow on the snowy walk. She was often like this, as though knowing she might be an antidote to the harshness of…
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APPARITION
In the night what I am perched on the edge of sleep you appear, just out of the dream shadows, avoiding the light, you are featureless. I call to you and I think you must be smiling but your voice is the wind through the Austrian pines and the drip from the ever shrinking icicles…
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ROAD DREAM
It’s 12 degrees the night air slices through my sweater my teeth chatter. Standing in the lot fetching my cell phone from the glove box my breath congeals around my face a cloud. I look up at the moon snowflakes dancing on my forehead. Luna’s face is shrouded by a cirrus veil, but her eyes…
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QUARTET
An evening summer retreating in the face of autumn, two garnacha, a piano, bass, drums, her voice lifts the weight of the sky and we float up on a melody, unchained. In heaven George and Ira smile and we, here, smile with them.
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MIND THE GAP
The difference between love and lust is as thin as the blade of a fine razor, as broad as the Rio Grande Canyon outside Taos, so how can you tell one from the other? Some will say it is an impossible task others will take the “I know it when I see it” route leading…
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ON 15 YEARS
Today is my 15th wedding anniversary, and that merits a special posting to the person who has completed me in ways I never imagined possible. The sheer inadequacy of words is made painfully manifest today. I grasp at words: love, passion, joy and each still falls short of its intended mark. There is a moment…
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EARLY MORNING
Early this morning as I drove through the mist that clings to Portland in March like a child’s yellow slicker, I thought of you, home, asleep on our bed, my side tidy, no faint indentation of life, and I thought of the thousands who have died to date in Iraq, who never again will leave…
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E-MOTION
She says she is angry and he finds that easy to understand. He as given up on anger, he finds it too exhausting and ultimately of such little value he has moved permanently on to cynicism and disdain. She says she finds little benefit in either, and having a certain amount of faith gives her…