• DIMENSIONS

    It is far less a matter of space for we have that in profusion if mostly always beyond reach, but unnecessary anyway given our pervasive fear of being alone while always trying to define our particular uniqueness. The universe has a vastness we can never hope to grasp and so we turn inward, where space…


  • CHECKOUT LINE

    Time seems frozen in the checkout line stuck between the Mars bars and the tabloids, you wonder how Liz could survive a total body liposuction, and further details of how OJ killed in a moment of lust. The old woman in front rummages in her change purse certain she has the eighty seven cents, the…


  • THE GATHERING

    They gather this time every week, they would feel lost if they did otherwise. The don’t do it out of any sense of duty or higher calling, and they expect nothing in return for having done so. They aren’t even following directions or obeying some unwritten rule. They object to most rules, demand logic before…


  • SAYING, NO PLEASE

    “Every once in a while,” he says and the screeching in my head drowns out what follows. I know what he means of course, that is the easy part, but the gulf between meaning and saying is so broad I can stop and count the traffic of ideas floating by, each seeking its own purchase,…


  • WHAT DID YOU DO

    When they asked him what did you do during the war he said “I just stood guard.” When they asked him where he said “A station, just a station, like most others, I just stood guard.” When they asked him did you see the trains carrying the bodies crammed into cattle cars he said “I…


  • RHINOCEROS

    If I ask you to bring me an atom of oxygen, where will you search for it, how will you isolate it, so that you have captured a single atom that you can bring in response to my request? It may take some time and great effort to satisfy my desire. Or you may simply…


  • ELEMENTAL, MY DEAR

    In the elemental scheme of things we humans are, at best, middling. We are minute in the scale of the universe, our time not even a glimmer, and as we age, time contracts, but only in the shortening forward direction. But pity the poor hydrogen-7 isotope whose life is likely over in 30 yactoseconds, absorbing…


  • COSMOLOGY

    Our purpose is to understand and then explain the order of the Universe: the logic of the neat array of stars from our centrally located observation deck, the galaxies as so many fractals seeking to hide their organization. We have no ability to control and lack the mechanisms to make all but the most minute…


  • MOMENT

    If you are patient and do not look for it, there is a still moment in each day when nothing at all happens, when the silence without demands a silence within, when thoughts evaporate like the mist of an early morning dew, when you have precisely enough and cannot imagine needing more, when where you…


  • NOT HERE

    Between now and eventually lies all of history. We are unable to see it though it lies in our field of vision. That’s the problem, we only know how to look backward. We are barely able to see where we are. It isn’t that we don’t want to be here, merely that here is difficult…