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YIDDISH
My grandmother lapsed into Yiddish only on special occasions “where other words won’t fit” she said, where there is no English to describe the indescribable, blessed be He, but we knew that it was merely a convenient way to keep us out of the conversation, while they clucked. Mah Johng is a game that can…
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AWAITING
He strains mightily to hear the sound of a wolf. He knows the voice of coyote well, and here they are ever-present. But wolf is a different creature. He knows coyote will try to take the shape and voice of wolf. But an elder such as he can tell the difference. Wolf is his totem,…
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CACOPHONY OF SILENCE
There is one thing a poet hates more than a page that refuses to be filled – it is coming across words that profess or are sworn to silence. I had a pen I truly loved until it announced early one morning it was taking a vow of iambic celibacy. Poems once pregnant with possibility…
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WAITING GAME
He is due to arrive as soon as we are ready. We have known for some time that he is on his way, and we want everything just so for him when he arrives. That is the least we can do, and the least he would expect. We are not certain just what he will…
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GENSHA’S IRON BOAT 鐵笛倒吹 八十語
Do not suggest you can only be enlightened on a cold day in hell unless you are prepared to carry the air conditioner across the River Styx. Even Cerberus has Buddha nature although none of the heads will say so. A reflection on Case 85 of the Iron Flute Koans
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AN OFF YEAR
The was a winter, once where even in the north the snow refused to fall and ice rejected jamming the culverts, the sky stared down in amazement. That was the year trees would not bud and flowers fled deeper into the sweetness of the earth, grass singed and lay indolent. It was a year my…
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DODECAPHOBIA OR NOT
As the moon begins it’s slow departure we step carefully out into the receiving night. The neighbor’s black cat looks up at the sky warily, steps around the ladder leaning against the house, and sits and contemplates the number thirteen, though it holds no special place in the feline world, it just seems the thing…
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NEVER THE LETHE
In the deepest, darkest portion of night we are taught that dreams reside, that they are not real, figments, fragments of imagination, woven into an evanescent tapestry that disappears upon waking, leaving only a faint shadow to indicate its once presence. Many like to believe this, for it relieves them of ownership of dark thoughts…
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ASKED AND ANSWERED
She wants to ask me how many lawyers can dance on the head of a pin, but she knows that at their hourly rates, no one will pause to count them. There is that, and the fact that lawyers are…
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HEART OF NIGHT
The morphology of dreams is partially reliant on the whims of a single god, and Morpheus is, to say the least, a truly fickle bastard who dangles before us joy and nightmare each always just out of reach, but never out of sight or hearing. So we are left to grasp like marionettes operated by…
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an old writer and his words 