• UNDER THE WEIGHT

    My shelves grow heavy with volumes of words I wish I had written, neatly bound up in books that stare at me, at once bidding me welcome and challenging me to enter. One shelf is set aside for books of pages, blank, on which I have written each day now for three and a half…


  • 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…


  • SLIP SLIDING AWAY

    There comes a moment at which both memory and history become blurred at the edges, where the bedrock on which belief has been so carefully erected seems more magma, shifting threatening to bring down the superstructure of desire and assumption. It is the fading that is at once both fear inducing and exhilarating for faith…


  • PC

    You set a record today, five blue screens, and finally there was no rebooting, and even the tech at her desk in Bangalore could not figure out the error message and politely gave up promising your replacement won’t have these problems. There’s a whole new set of crashes and lockups waiting in the box down…


  • MORNING SLOWLY

    Morning slowly encroaches on your dreams, eroding images despite your tightening grasp. Clear lines blur, become hazy and dissipate, bleached by the first light creeping around the shades. The dreams do not care for they will arise again when they choose and this is for them a mere inconvenience. You are the loser here for…


  • MIDDLE C

    Mrs. Weiskopf lived in a small cottage Mrs. Weiskopf taught piano in her living room. Mrs. Weiskopf had no first name, even checks were to be made payable to Mrs. Weiskopf. Mrs. Weiskopf grew suddenly old, some said, to full fit into her name, no one could remember her ever being young. Mrs. Weiskopf said…


  • A MONK IN MEDITATION 鐵笛倒吹 七十語

    A man may own may volumes of great knowledge and never have time to read. An illiterate may take such books and fashion a stool on which to sit in meditation. Which of these is truly wise which the greatest fool. Wipe your mouth with this page at the conclusion of the meal. A reflection…


  • MOMENT

    Enter slowly, calmly, and we dare say enter at your own risk for you cannot know what will happen within, nor can we although we have been here countless times before if our memory serves us, which of course it cannot for it, too, is stuck in this very moment with no escape. Do not…


  • EACH

    imagine these words written end to end, each well known but the order setting this apart, in a long single line with a half twist Moebius-like, and not on a page but a band like life nothing discrete a continuum each word the only word each moment the only moment if you wish


  • NIGHT AT THE PUB

    It’s a fading memory now, a hole in the wall then, CBGB’s, loud, but nothing happening at Tommy Makem’s and here the cop and his pals play angry Irish with a foot in reggae and ska. I’m too old to be here, but no one really cares as long as I buy my Bushmills or…