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FINDING
Even when I was briefly in Edinburgh I dreamed of walking the streets of Lisbon or Porto looking into the faces of older men and wondering if this one was my father. the father I had never seen, never known. Was the one my Jewish mother described in detail to the social worker who took…
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THE SENTENCE
I was honored to have this poem recently published by Please See Me, 2019 Issue 3. You can see the original here (and other work by some fine writers: https://pleaseseeme.com/issue-3/poetry/the-sentence-louis-faber “Probable metastatic lesions secondary to breast cancer.” Complex words set at the bottom of a page, impenetrable jargon. Two spots where pelvis and spine are…
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METASTASIS
She could barely move her head the cancer climbed her spine reaching upward, clutching vertebrae reaching out, tendrils grasping tearing fragile organs. She would cry, but that would be an admission of defeat, a welcome to death. I cried out for her, entreated our God for compassion that she might stand by her sons when…
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EARLY IN THE SECOND BOOK
She wrapped him carefully in an old blanket and several sections of the Times and put him in the basket with the broken handle she found out behind the Safeway near the culvert that was home until the rains came. She placed him among the weeds and beer bottles, where the river’s smell licked the…
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CRISIS
He wants to have his midlife crisis in peace and quiet. He has penciled it in his calendar for at least five years now. Something always comes up, something that demands he be in public, and he simply will not have a crisis in that setting, no matter what. He’s sure he supposed to have…
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-NESS
Last week it was hers but we felt it ours, and wondered why her furniture, her life was impinging on this “our-ness.” Today it is ours and empty, and it has a deep sense of “whose-ness,” where we can see how easily “ours-ness” might return. Next week it will be our home and we will…
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RINZAI PLANTS A PINE 鐵笛倒吹 十八
If you have a seed in your pocket what will you do with it? Even a small seed planted carefully in the middle of a forest may take hold and grow. Tamp the soil with your toe three time, three times again secure in knowing this tree will never provide you shade. A reflection on…
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CHANGE
They lie in the field uprooted slowly desicating in the harsh sun, the fruit they might have borne trapped in the dying flower, the seed of another generation denied. It was not supposed to be like this, the sun should have fed them, the soil nourished their souls, their stalks growing thicker, drawing ever more…
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THE CANNERY, LATE INTO THE NIGHT
The cannery, long before it was a mall, sat on the verge of the bay bellowing steam into the night sky shrouding the stars in a gauze blanket, listening to the braying of the harbor seals pleading for the morning’s dross to be returned to the bay waters. The otters lie on their backs peering…
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THEN NOW
The gap between hail and farewell is small an unbridgeable, no one can walk across, and yet the mind spans but falls away, to hail and ultimately to farewell and between they stare into a chasm they call life
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an old writer and his words 