• REMEMBERED

    She said she recalled the spilled glass of wine that stained her white linen blouse. She said the city swallows people like a hungry beast that will never be sated. I taste the summer sun and the sweetness of an early rain in the Shiraz that foretells approaching winter. The city is a cat that…


  • BEING

    “Be in the moment,” he says repeatedly, imagining this is what the teacher should say. I want to tell him there is no other possible moment I could be in, but having to try to find the words instantly takes me out of this and every other possible moment. It is said that when the…


  • ALONG THE MIDDLE WAY

    Each day he stops briefly in the small park along the path, and picks up a pebble which he tucks in the coin pocket of his jeans. There it rests until he comes the pond where he sits on the shore staring out into the heart of the water. He pulls the pebble and tosses…


  • MORROW’S WISH

    Each night I stare up at the sky, scanning for the one star that is there solely to answer whatever entreaties I choose to make. It is said that we each have a lucky star, but perhaps, given the ever-expanding population of the world, mine is just too dim to see from the city in…


  • TAPESTRY

      It is like emotions are something you wear on your sleeve, he said, picking at threads of sadness, trying to pry them from the fabric of the moment, never understanding they were the warp of his existence, joy and laughter, compassion and empathy the weft. She said, that is only an illusion, and you…


  • DOG’S BEST FRIEND

    The dog wandered up to me. Dogs often did that. This time he dragged his person along, none too pleased at the extension of what the person hoped was a short walk. Both dog and person smiled, the dog meaning it, the person likely out of habit. The dog confirmed the person was impatient. The…


  • AFLOAT

      Dreams are the gentle sea across which we float as night embraces us. This is the preferred view, but in the stormy dark our dreams turn violent tossing us against thoughts we have long suppressed. It is how we row, how we ride he swells, searching for the calm on the horizon that allows…


  • CECI N’EST PAS UN PARC

    This morning over the Park a Magritte sky is hung. Several birds gather in an old oak to discuss this, twittering thoughts in surprise. Their conclusions fly off at the approach of a black lab joyously frolicking in imagined freedom.


  • SITTING SHIVA

    The sitting of  Shiva is a tribal right performed with Kaddish and coffeecake. The mourning is harder for the adult child, for the now severed bond grows with time and not distance, and there comes a point where the loss invokes your mortality. Tonight we all speak of the departed off on a journey we never…


  • 4/4 TIME

    Musicians have a clock that runs on its own time and all that is constant is the beat, in four second increments. They start, they say, when the music is ready, never before and music is fickle: tonight it wanted to sit off stage and rest an hour, another night it begins precisely as advertised…