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LIKE DUST
We are obligated to carry memories, and as we get older, the burden grows ever heavier, we bend under its weight, knowing we dare not lose even one for once cast off, the weight is carried off like the smallest feather on a storming wind. Soon enough it is we who Will become the burden…
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MINE, NEVER MINE
I imagine to myself that this is my house abutting on my small portion of this street sitting on my small patch of land I pay the mortgage and the taxes, so I am entitled to rent this delusion just a bit longer, and it all works, until I stop and think But before I…
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PATER INCOGNITA
He often comes to me in dreams. In most he is faceless, but intently present, speaking in a voice I instantly know, nothing like mine and totally mine. On occasion his face appears, blurred, as if seen through a scrim, back-lit, vague, an actor in some film I have seen, but yet not that person,…
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VIOLIN
We sat at the table, sucking the last of the djej from the bones piled along the edge of the platter. “I played for seven years” he said, “under Tilson-Thomas and later Rudel, bad years those, I sat two rows back second from the stage edge.” He was unremarkable, forgettable until he nestled the violin…
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PHYSICS
She is seven, going on some much larger number. She believes in the tooth fairy. She believes in the scientific method. She believes in vegetarianism and ecology. She believes in helping her parents and was doing so when she found her baby teeth in a small bag in their dresser. She no longer believes in…
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WALKING
Like the Anasazi’s sudden departure from his cliff dwelling I too snuck away, with hardly any trace from a life no longer in clear recollection, only faint images survive, of hours in the City Lights Bookstore reading Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, then buying the slim volume “Gasoline” not because it was my greatest desire, but…
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RINZAI PLANTS A PINE
If you have a seed in your pocket what will you do with it? Even a small seed planted carefully in the middle of a forest may take hold and grow. Tamp the soil with your toe three times, three times again secure in knowing this tree will never provide you shade. A reflection on…
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MARC MY WORDS
You were born 128 years ago, not a long time in the history of the planet and a blink in the life of the universe but two good lifetimes on the day you came into the world, not knowing what would become your place in it. We celebrate you today, as we celebrated you during…
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FOREVER, ALMOST
It is a large boulder in the middle of a rutted path. That path leads nowhere in particular. It comes to an end at the edge of what appears to be a dense forest. Several trees are posted with “Do Not Trespass” signs, long faded until you must stare to make out the words. The…
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DACHAIGH
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 one I had never seen, never known. the one my Jewish mother described in detail to the social worker who took me…
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an old writer and his words 