-
TODAY, ALAS
Too much of what passes for literature in these days is really no more lasting than the evanescent pixels from which it is created. Books fade, pages crumble to dust but that requires the passage of time that our electronic world avoids or simply refuses to acknowledge, for history is something that lives in storage,…
-
SLOW STREAM
The river that I imagined, a torrent of words and images is little more than a dry trickle, construction cranes along one shore hauling away half- and ill-formed thoughts, leaving only desire and frustration as a marker of what might have been. I looked at each bend, hidden from sight as harboring that epiphany that…
-
JIZO’S FLOWER
When you see a painting of a beautiful rose, how can you describe it. You must breathe deeply of its sweet fragrance Be careful, do not pierce your finger on its waiting thorns. The rose has withered into dust before your mouth is opened. A reflection on Case 76 of the Iron Flute Koans
-
LUDWIG
When I was twelve, I think, maybe in the last days of eleven, and in my third year of piano lessons my teacher, Mrs. Schwarting, she of no first name, and a steady hand that could squeeze the muscle of my shoulder, a taloned metronome, gave me a small plastic bust of Beethoven, told me…
-
PHOENIX
A Phoenix may rise from the ashes, but you and I have seen the aftermath of the flames and all that rises are our memories and dreams. We lack both wings and a certain amount of faith, for ashes are all that is promised and in the end we are no more than dust avoiding…
-
SKELETONS
Their corpses have been gathering dust in the closet where I keep them, in boxes, once neatly labeled, but the collection has grown so large I’ve given up any attempt at organization. I do, periodically, take a glance into the boxes, take a few out and carefully consider them, but heeding the proscription, I always…
-
MARCHING ON
He notes with alacrity that modern man has stripped all logic from time, rendering it an arbitrary temporal system based on mechanics, and even that is quadrennially imperfect. Once it was seasons, which came and went in orderly fashion, but heating was never a science then. Later it was the moon a reusable calendar…
-
MINDFUL MINDLESS NESS
The difference between before and after is the moment we can never seem to grasp. In the time it takes to read the definition of evanescence, its meaning is lost to history. That, ultimately is the failure of thought and logic, for the process is so overwhelming what we process is turned to dust in…
-
DISCOVERY
In a small storefront, in an older neighborhood of the city, I found it. Sepia coated with a fine sheen of dust and neglect, it lay on the table amid a stack of others, as though a leaf of phyllo in a poorly made stack fresh from the oven. I knew it as I looked…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
an old writer and his words 