an old writer and his words

  • TRICKSTER

    “Coyote is always out there waiting, and Coyote is always hungry.”  — Navajo Saying

    Lou Faber

  • RELATIVE(LY)

    Where I live we have hills. Mostly we have hillocks, but here they call the very high hills mountains so we have to call the hillocks hills. It is a question of relativity. Einstein understood relativity.   He was born near Feldberg which rose nearly 4900 feet up. He lived in New Jersey where you could…

    Lou Faber

  • ACROSS THE ABYSS

    The gulf between dream and nightmare is easily bridged in a single step. It should not be a step taken lightly, but one taken in both directions. We coddle dreams, dread nightmares, but we tell them apart on a level neither they nor we can hope to understand. Both are reality. Neither is reality. And…

    Lou Faber

  • FADED MEMORY

    I want to paint O. Henry’s leaf on the wall outside my sister’s window.  She won’t be able to see it for the giant maple that obscures her view.  Even when it drops its leaves a few always cling in the neverland between green and mulch.  And anyway, she says, her neck is always stiff,…

    Lou Faber

  • ALL THAT JAZZ

    The cat only wants to go outside.  It’s night, her favorite time, and she stalks the uncoiled garden hose, which has become a fierce green snake that falls to her attack.  He and she are dead tired, drowned in the sixth night of the fifth annual jazz festival.  His shirt is bathed in the half…

    Lou Faber

  • UNEQUINOX

    A robin is slowly building her nest.  She sits on one of the higher branches of our still winter-naked maple.  She anxiously tucks small twigs, weaving the impenetrable.  Each time I walk beneath she sits up and chides me.  She is an expert in propriety. My lover and I walk down a rutted path, grasses…

    Lou Faber

  • Hiatus

    It was, simply, the strangest summer of his life. He didn’t go home between semesters, as he agreed he would when his parents agreed to pay for college. Their marriage was quickly unravelling and each frayed thread was a live wire that threatened to burn anyone it touched, and he needed none of that. Years…

    Lou Faber

  • Memory

    We were told the average background color of the universe was turquoise.  She said “that’s because a coyote ripped it from the mountains outside Cerrillos.  But now they say it’s actually a shade of dark beige, drying mud colored.”  It was a glitch in the software, the astronomers said.  The coyote was unmoved. She sits…

    Lou Faber

  • Doors

    He walks slowly into the room. He looks around, noting the position of every piece of furniture, each picture on the wall, the nap of the rug, how the rug is slightly off angle giving the room a sense of rhombus-ness. When he leaves and locks the door behind him, there is a sudden darkness,…

    Lou Faber

  • Where?

    Walk slowly down the path. Note the stones along the way. Step on them, or over them, the choice is yours. The sky is still above you, there is no reason to look up. Do not seek a map, for at best it will say “You Are Here!” As if you could be anywhere else. With…

    Lou Faber