As he grew ever older he said
he wanted a sudden unanticipated death,
“In my sleep preferably” he added
with an unmeant chuckle.
It would be a good way to go,
I imagine, but it denies those
who will most mourn his passing
the chance to hope for a miracle.
And no matter when it happens,
if it is sudden it will always be too soon,
only the protracted death is timely
for those needing to say goodbye.
It will soon enough be time again,
I am an old clockface on a tower
at which no one but the truly bored
bother to look, tucked in a corner
of a village half empty, its life
moved away to places cooler,
less stormy. So I sit and watch
what life remains around me,
the few children wishing they
could be elsewhere, some parents
wishing they had used birth control.
No one looks, no one really cares
but I have little choice, it is my fate
to mark passages, entrances,
but my hands are growing tired
and at some not far off point
they will stop moving, and I
wonder if anyone will care.
He found the cup by the curb one morning walking to the bus.
He rarely notice things on his walk, thinking always about the
day ahead. But this day he saw it, picked it up and put it in his
messenger bag intending to clean it later, when he got home
after work. He had no idea why he wanted it. It wasn’t
particularly pretty, a drab red with a mark where a decal had
long ago peeled away. He forgot it, until he found it in his bag
several days later, he washed it and placed it on a special shelf
in his kitchen cabinet. The shelf was reserved for things he
found with which he intended to do something, but that
something had not yet happened. He knew something was
missing from the shelf, so he took a selfie, printed it and placed
it on the shelf.
First published in The Birdseed, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2021
When I saw you this morning
I knew instantly that I hadn’t seen you
in more than twenty years,
although it is quite possible we
have never met and today
was the first time my eyes
ever gazed at your face .
I suppose it is lucky that
you did not recognize me
although I don’t think I’ve changed
all that much in twenty years.
I was going to call out your name,
but decided against it in case
you have changed it or, possibly
because you wouldn’t answer
to the name I choose to give you.
It was good seeing you today,
let’s do again in a decade or so.
The most disturbing thing
about lemmings is not
that they follow one after another
over a cliff or into traffic,
it is not the carnage
that inevitably ensues,
one after another doomed
by the need to follow blindly.
The disturbing thing
is not the knowledge that
lemmings only follow,
so someone directed
the first in line into
a suicidal act.
The most disturbing thing
is that lemmings
do not commit
mass suicide, it is
only in our tortured
use of cliches
that they meet their death.
You didn’t have to go, you know
I did enjoy having you around,
and I am sorely missing you now.
They said the odds of you
leaving, of even planning a departure
were small, but what did they know.
They didn’t know that I
had traits that would make
your departure more likely.
They didn’t say that once
the word was uttered, a departure
was no doubt inevitable, a when not if.
I’d like to think you’ll come back
but everyone agrees you cannot
absent some sort of miracle.
But at least, for now, I still
have your twin, and I will treasure
him as long as I can see to do so.
It is the difference I always notice
between small and large cities: the parks.
When you sit deeply within
Boston Commons or Central Park
you can feel the city always
threatening to encroach and
once again make you its prisoner,
smell and hear the city, traffic
and trucks rumbling, horns
played in a cacophonous symphony.
In small cities you can sit in a park
and wonder where downtown
could be, distant, a whisper perhaps
alwlays unseen, and you can
get lost in dreams of childhood
smell newly mown grass, and
listen unimpeded to the stories
the trees are all to willing to tell.
Life should be a like a mountain
although truth be told, we
prefer it more like a prairie
or at best a gentle, rolling hill.
There is a challenge to climbing,
hell maintaining a grip halfway
up most mountains, and
there are no maps, no
well worn paths, you just
go up until you cannot
go up higher then you
figure out how to come down.
Down is the hard part,
and you don’t want it to go
quickly for that is a prescription
for the undertaker, and when
you do finally get down, you
want to say I did it all,
there is nothig left
that I still need to do.
If you stare
at a large stone
and call it a mountain
the ant will agree with you.
If you gaze on a mountain
and call it a stone
there can be no argument.
If I call that tree
a toothpick
clean your teeth carefully.
A reflection on Case 112 of Dogen’s Shobogenzo (True Dharma Eye) Koans
As a child he decided,
after watching Cosmos,
that he wanted to be an astronomer.
He was six, we bought
a large telescope and I was assigned
the job of aiming it
according to his directions.
After a while he did
have a mment of panic, wondering
what he would do
during the day.
That soon passed
when he discovered the radio telescope
and time became of
absolutely no importance.
He is an adult now,
a theoretical astrophysicist,
much easier on the eyes
he says, and your hours
are your own
and the universe’s.
an old writer and his words 