The pelican has remarkable patience. It doesn’t hurt that he knows how this will play out. It’s pretty much the same, day after day. That’s life on the jetty. Once the crusty old man is done fishing, once he packs up his cart to leave, he will dump his remaining bait fish on the jetty. Or, as the pelican prefers to think of it, the buffet table.
They sit or stand patiently
on the jetty, a concrete path
jutting out into the ocean.
The old timers have two
lines out, bait bucket
sitting in the bicycle-wheeled
cart parked on the edge
of the jetty’s bouldered margin.
You don’t ask what they’ve
caught, that would be obvious,
and you know they are here for
the act of fishing, and the catch
is that there never is
the expectation of one.
Preparing it to undergo
the knife, its core excised,
stem cast aside, sliced
then cut into pieces
I pause to consider that
this pear was once
a blossom, a delicate
white flower, its cranberry
red anthes soon to turn
black, picked carefully,
cradled into a bushel,
by a knowing hand,
washed, and gently
packed for shipment.
For me it was just
plucking it from the bin
at the market, holding
it in the harsh lighting
looking for blemishes,
and then placing it
in the cart, then the bag
hoping it would not
bruise before undergoing
its final surgery.
A collection of sticks
and boards is Keichu’s cart
Keichu’s cart no more
than a pile
of sticks and boards
not I
rides no horse
pulling no cart
a hundred spokes
dance in ten directions.
A reflection on Case 8 of the Mumonkan (Gateless Gate Koans)
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 coins
lost in a blue haze reflected off her hair.
Two aisles over the young mother
her jaw clenched in frustration
keeps putting the life savers back
on the shelf as her child, fidgeting
in the cart grabs another roll, until
she shouts and slaps his hand.
His cry draws stares from all and she
stares at the floor as he grabs
a Three Musketeers and Certs.
A man in the express line swears
that the apples were marked 89 cents
and wants to see the manager
who calmly explains that Granny Smiths
are a dollar twenty nine and only small
Macintoshes are on sale this week.
He puts the bag on the scale
and stalks out of the store.
I would shift to the express lane
but I have 16 items and must
continue to wait and wonder
how many incisions it would take
for a full body liposuction.
Previously appeared in Kimera: A Journal of Fine Writing, Vol. 3, No.2, 1998 and in The Right to Depart, Plainview Press, 2008
It is hard, he says,
to put your cart
before your horse
when you have neither.
So then you are left
with the choice
of whether to buy
a horse and try
to overload it
until it cannot walk
or a cart easily filled
that no one can move,
or to just buy a half
dozen clichés.
She says she is certain she exists,
much as she is certain he exists as well.
He says, she thinks she exists,
thinks he does as well.
Descartes, he says,
was right, at least on that point.
She says no, it is obvious, thoughts
requires existence. Sum ergo cogito,
she says, is how it must be:
a thought requires the thinker.
He says a thinker requires a thought first,
without which there is no thinker.
She says an egg doesn’t mean
a chicken will emerge.
The chicken
will, if all goes well, he claims.
He says she puts the cart
before the horse.
She says
he is an ass, and hers
is a donkey cart, and she
dangles a carrot from a stick
in front of him as he
pulls her cart slowly down the road.
an old writer and his words 