• INCARNATION

    I had been sitting for an hourin the coffee shop areaof the now gone Borders bookstoretrying to piece together the shardsof a life shattered by the impendingend of a long marriage that wasgoing to last for a lifetime.And I was hoping, perhaps,to meet someone, ready or not,to try and fill the smallest cornerof what was…


  • DARE I SAY

    Few will dare say it, but Ihave always imagined myselfamong the few at most thingsso I suppose it falls to me. The lifecycle of the poetincises an arc and there arerecognizable nodes along its pathfrom beginning to end. The first poem published in ajournal, no matter how small,then one in a publication othershave heard of,…


  • UNANSWERED

    As strange as it seems, I canspend hours in a used bookstorelost in the marginalia, and textbooks, particularly those in psych and sociologyare generally the most fertile,for those students, though they would never admit it, pursued those fieldshoping to find answers to their ownproblems without having to ask. Yesterday’s visit was particularly fertile,but it was…


  • 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…


  • ERATO PREFERS LATTE

    My muse sits quietly on the shelf over the counter in the Café Espresso at Barnes and Noble nestled between 12 ounce bags of Colombian Supremo and Kenya AA, in the shadow of the plant whose leaves reach out to caress her cheek. She whispers to me between notes from the guitarist performing on the…


  • FOYLES

    Charing Cross Road booksellers woven amid theaters cramped sagging shelves an out of print Christine Evans, slim, collected works of those long forgotten never noticed a damp chill enfolds old leather as the door opens and shuts on a late February. Morning, my purchases sink in the plastic bag dancing as I walk to the…


  • ANOTHER GHETTO

    She sits in the bookstore cafe her head covered by a linen kerchief bobby pinned to the mass of walnut curls. She cradles the cup of cooling coffee and stares down at the slim book of Amichai, yielding to the Hebrew letters that seem to dance across the page. I sit at the adjoining table…


  • CORSO

    When my back was turned, Corso slipped away somewhere in Wisconsin silently, without protest carried off by Charon across a gasoline river. There was no bomb to announce his departure, no Queens orphanage stopped frozen in a silent moment. In the small park at the north end of Salt Lake City no one lifted a…