• OF DREAMS

    I am now of an agewhere I can no longer rememberwhat terrors gripped my sonsin their dreams, causing themto appear beneath our blankets,I relegated to the bed’s edge. Perhaps there were noneand I was destined to bean edge sleeper, the boystaking advantage as a jokeplayed out night after night. I know what dreams nowcan rip…


  • WE COULD

    We could, if you want,sit in the park on our foldingchairs or better a folded blanketand stare out over the pond,its silver surface shirredby a midday breeze. We could picnic, sandwichesof brie and apples, or for ushummous with tahini anda bottle of chardonnay, carefullypoured into plastic glassesimagining themseles crystal. The dragonflies would ignore us,busy doing…


  • WINTER

    As I stare out the window and watchthe snow slowly build on the limbsof the now barren crab apple, paintingit with a whiteness that bears heavily,giving the smaller branches a betterview of the ground in which theirfruit of the summer lies buried. I am forced to wonder if the treecontinues to watch me, if its…


  • TRAVEL: TWO THOUGHTS

    The packed suitcase sits on the futon but neither it nor I are in any hurry to depart. 4 AM in Chicago blanketed in snow is an orange neon painting.


  • DAWN, AUGUST

    They cut neat incisions across the slate blue sky. The wounds they leave slowly peel back the white edges slowly spreading until the sky hemorrhages its cloud-like streaks. The oak drops yet another acorn and the squirrel scampers to gather it in before the sky flees under its gray-white blanket.


  • ANGRY, BUT ONLY A LITTLE

    You want it spicy, but just so that the tongue remembers it a moment after the mouth has moved on, a lingering sense of having been present. It should be a mantilla, a shawl, not the blanket some claim, gently caressing, lighting up the plate. Its host, freshly from the rollers, was born for this…


  • DHARMA

    In Tibet there are more than 80 words to describe states of consciousness, several words to explain the sound of prayer flags rustling in a Himalayan breeze that reaches up to the crest of the peaks that lick at the slowly gathering clouds, all of these words never uttered. There are no words in Tibet…


  • BURDEN OF WINTER

    On this one a taste clinging gingerly, on this one clumps, here a variegated blanket. Each tree bears the burden of winter in its own way.


  • TOMORROW

    As night settles over our house we slip beneath the blanket and imagine the day to come in all of its promise. By morning, reality will set in and I will awake to a day reliant on us to set its course, a captain with no chart and only hope and compassion to steer us…