• ASHES TO DUST

    The dolphin is born of the water, the man born of the fire and of the earth. The dolphin swims unrestrained, the man chooses to live in the city of Afterlife, focussed on impending rebirth. The dolphin stares up in wonder at the amassing clouds, the man curses the sky shielding him from heaven. The dolphin…


  • THREE HAIKU

    Giant cranes are perched on thin spindly legs, necks bowed steel beams scratch the clouds. Needle-like church spires reach through the gathering mist clouds begin to bleed. Walls stand in the field one stone piled on another grass withers in shade.


  • REFLECTING ON THE HARBOR

    On the anniversary of the start of a war one feels almost compelled to speak to its horrors, its cause, its effect. But we live in an age where wars are plentiful, when peace is the exception and war seems to loom around every corner. So on this anniversary I watch the snowy egret stare…


  • LUNA REFLECTS

    Tonight the moon will gnaw away at the stars, consuming them much as the beaver consumes trees to build a proper home. We will stare at the moon, marvel at its size, at its brightness, wonder why we never noticed it like this before, realize it is because we are so young, that our memory…


  • FOR RENE

    What is inconceivable about the universe is that it should be at all conceivable. — A. Einstein Cogito dice clatter against a corner of the universe, rolling the bones of a thousand generations ergo one slides into the black hole void a loser next player to the line sum boxcars stacked as cordwood the snake…


  • PADDIES

    At first it is a checkerboard of ponds neatly arrayed, reflecting the sun, the work of man, for God so rarely plays geometrician with creation, less often still using right angles. Soon enough green blades reach up through the shirred surface, random, reaching for a sun they can never touch. Later, it is a field,…


  • VERITAS

    It is the promise of the grape that lures us, that allows us to imagine the glass stained purple, or a deep golden yellow, an alluring pink. It may be accompanied by words that suggest the approach of a moment not to be forgotten, deep, vibrant, tobacco, stone fruit, a veritable catalog to entice us,…


  • DREAM

    She took the flower, placed it gently, arranged just so, between the pages of the giant tome, and closed the book setting it carefully back on the shelf where it would remain until someone, seeing its leathered spine might pull it out, blow off the dust and open to that page, and look into her…


  • STARING AT NIRVANA

    The great blue heron stares at the shirred surface of the pond, paying no attention to the ibis pecking around her, ignoring the traffic passing on the road, pausing now and again to marvel how the humans on foot and in cars cannot see that on a November day the quiet stillness of the water…


  • MORNING, ATTENDANT

    Morning would find him sitting calmly, cross-legged, under the apple tree that sat on the edge of the park, staring up at a small branch and carefully watching the bud begin to open, ignoring all who passed. Morning would find him sitting calmly, cross-legged, under the apple tree watching the fragile blossom open, staring at…