• A MOVING MIND 無門關 二十九

    Do not be a foolish monk stare up at the sky is that could moving? The leaves dance on the morning breeze, is the wind moving? take a picture of the tree a moment of time frozen There is no motion of the tree, none of the wind only the mind moves. A reflection on…


  • NATURALIA NON SUNT TURPIA

    When did we stop being of the soil and begin to fear it, to tell our children not to touch the ground, it is dirty where once it was only dirt, and we put in our mouths, from time to time if only to drive our mothers crazy. She says if you are going to…


  • FINDING

    Even when I was briefly in Edinburgh I dreamed of walking the streets of Lisbon or Porto looking into the faces of older men and wondering if this one was my father. the father I had never seen, never known. Was the one my Jewish mother described in detail to the social worker who took…


  • MORNING READING

    You read the obituaries every day not only for the affirmation that you are not listed among them The key five words there are not only for the affirmation, particularly upon hearing the gentle man you liked, that you valued as a friend and craftsman is gone, but you didn’t say goodbye, that you thought…


  • THE SENTENCE

    I was honored to have this poem recently published by Please See Me, 2019 Issue 3. You can see the original here (and other work by some fine writers: https://pleaseseeme.com/issue-3/poetry/the-sentence-louis-faber “Probable metastatic lesions secondary to breast cancer.” Complex words set at the bottom of a page, impenetrable jargon. Two spots where pelvis and spine are…


  • WEAVING

    She plucks the odd loose thread puts it on the table and finds another and a bit of what could be twine. She weaves them together loosely, with seeming abandon until they are an ill formed braid barely hanging together, a jumble of color and fabric, a true hodge-podge. But when she says to all…


  • HANGING BY A THREAD

    In Riga, my grandfather was a master tailor, the great and the rich would come to his shop some bringing bolts of fine cloth and others trusting him knowing that wools and silks were not beyond his reach. Even after they marked his home as that of the Jew, the Captain, who rode through the…


  • TODAY, ALAS

    Too much of what passes for literature in these days is really no more lasting than the evanescent pixels from which it is created. Books fade, pages crumble to dust but that requires the passage of time that our electronic world avoids or simply refuses to acknowledge, for history is something that lives in storage,…


  • IMPRESSIONS

    I have no reason to venture to Tahiti for Gaugin took me there years ago, and again on a visit to Chicago and one to New York, or was it Cleveland, it hardly matters, for I know that the Tahiti of my experience no longer exists, touristed to death, itself at constant risk of drowning.…


  • METASTASIS

    She could barely move her head the cancer climbed her spine reaching upward, clutching vertebrae reaching out, tendrils grasping tearing fragile organs. She would cry, but that would be an admission of defeat, a welcome to death. I cried out for her, entreated our God for compassion that she might stand by her sons when…