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KODACHROME
There was a time once when your day on any tour to Europe or Asia was aim frame click pray and wait. Now it’s aimclicksavenext repeated endlessly until, once again home, you have hundreds of prayers unanswered.
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CITY LIGHTS
It was a Tuesday in October or a Wednesday in March, hard to say which, but evening. We had taken a cab from the Hyatt Embarcadero or the Fairmont, it didn’t much matter, and sat in the Chinese restaurant on the edge of Chinatown, or a pasta and seafood joint in North Beach, and you…
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CAUSALITY DILEMMA
There is a reason for all things and therefore there is a reason for this although we cannot begin to fathom what that reason could possibly be, which may be reason enough, for reason has a twisted soul — now playful, now angry, now vengeful in irregular turns without warnings. The problem with seeking the…
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NOUS SOMMES ICI
The question, of course, is which is Frankenstein, which his monster a chicken and egg problem that invites debate, denies solution. They say, of course, it is you – We sent you Lafayette, never assuming quelle catastrophe would grow from our gift. Freedom doesn’t make you a God but somehow you never learned that too…
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MISTAKE IN SPEAKING 無門關 三十九
When you speak the words of the Buddha you are lost. Light is everywhere in silence but the tongue must hide in the dark of the mouth. Buddha’s words are flowers unfolding in the dawn by the side of the still pond, the eyes hear the song and respond in silent chorus. A reflection on…
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SLOW STREAM
The river that I imagined, a torrent of words and images is little more than a dry trickle, construction cranes along one shore hauling away half- and ill-formed thoughts, leaving only desire and frustration as a marker of what might have been. I looked at each bend, hidden from sight as harboring that epiphany that…
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TONGUES
Ninety-six years ago today Women gained the right to vote. It would be another five before those who preceded the lot of us were blessed with citizenship, the least we could offer, after our prior gifts of disease, alcoholism and down sizing. Who, our forebears must have imagined, wouldn’t want to live somewhere they had…
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PHOTO
Oddly I have a photo of my grandmother’s grave, but not one of my mothers, either of them actually, and we’ve yet to have a funeral for the one who raised me. I forgive the one who gave me life, for she gave me to one she felt could care for me well and she…
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THE CEMETERY, AFTER THE BATTLE
They come to her in the dark the voices whisper, she hears them from behind half lidded eyes they sound like the children that once ran across the open field chasing the ball, a too slow bird a mortar shell whose fall outpaced them all, left them scattered, shattered, marked by simple wooden crosses that…
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DISCONCERT
The crows are disconcerted this morning. It could be that the sun startled them or that they were simply present to protest the cold for clearly they despise it as much as we do.