Journey to the Center
Traveling seems to have provided the best option for healing. If I’d stayed at the farm, I’d have been pacing my cage in a place where I felt little or no connection. Here on the road, there are so many new and unpredictable experiences each day, that it’s practically impossible to sustain any emotion, especially anger, for more than a few moments at a time. Driving the van requires at least some level of dumb concentration. In fact, to me, it seems almost a form of meditation.
—-
Coyote Crossing
The planners call these emerging trails “desire lines.” They lead through those places where the pavement falters.
—-
A Walk Around the Lake
thankfully the skeleton
days have returned
it’s fossil time again
—-
Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages
Where once I slipped like a minnow
in between legs, eye-level with fags
and wedding rings; where once my
fish voice swam in the mill-race
of their laughter, now I watch brief
dust rise from bare boards and listen
to the ticking of a house settling onto
its bones.
—-
Vicious or Virtuous
The bulbous end of my nose
is fed by food, cavernous
to the whiff of hunger,
inhales the invisible
table that runs to the horizon…
—-
blue hookah
All night my house lies dying
in the basement
but the black bead swells
at morning; it hoists
rooms whole from numbness.
—-
Velveteen Rabbi
In those moments, says my teacher Rabbi Jeff Roth, the best we can do may be to pray for the ability to feel gratitude at some future moment, and to say our words of gratitude in hopes that speaking the words will cause the emotion to arise in us. We don’t only get to say “thank you” when we feel like it.
—-
tasting rhubarb
I laughed and laughed and felt sorry that I hadn’t laughed much recently, dauntingly busy yet again at work, and glad that my sense of humour was intact (is there anything more resilient than humour?). And I thought: where would I be without books?
—-
Pohanginapete
What is it about libraries that attracts what might, for want of a more politically correct expression, be called the different people?
—-
Stoney Moss
There are no trees here, they are frames
for froth. Stick-thin girls walk a runway
covered in green animal fur. Five breaking wrists
display their meat on a spit.
—-
RLC
The classroom buildings are now a memorial — room after room of skeletons. The perpetrators doused the bodies with lime immediately after killing, to hasten disintegration, but the skeletons remain and some of them have patches of black hair on their heads, and even shreds of clothing.
—-
Graceriver
These are not ordinary playing cards. Soon you will be expected to speak their disappeared language. To parse words from faces and numbers, from three colors, or four. To talk about the spy’s incomplete mission, the village of subterranean ninjas, the soldier’s tattered coat: a dark and somber shell with its wool lining shrugging loose from buttonholes. The varmint in the garden.
—-
The Online Photographer
Then, months later, pottering about the neighborhood on my new bike, which I love, and have named Gruesome — no, not Pequod — I saw the white squirrel again — unmistakeably, this time, from my perch high atop my two-wheeled crow’s nest. He was gamboling happily by the side of the road, in plain view, some two blocks from where I’d originally espied him. Again, poor wretch that I was, I had no camera with me.
—-
autobiology
I told her I envied, in some ways, all those who were raised within a particular tradition, all those who had both ritual and lineage, who could share what I too-often experienced as an uncontainable and overwhelming reverence or awe. I told her I tried, for the most part, not to think of it.
So why not choose?
They are all so wonderful, and so rich, and so true; they are all so bloody and so broken; they are all so beautiful, and so terrible. I could not possibly.
—-
Fifty-Two: Weekly Poems
Over her bare shoulder, no headlines
can be seen, bad news printed as finely
as good news, center pages no wider
than her linen tablecloth …
—-
3rd House Journal
Mischievous winds tuck fallen leaves into our pockets.
We give them to sales clerk thinking it’s money,
pull them from behind our ears like magic tricks.
—-
mole
I suspect that it’s often this way with vision quests: it’s only when you’re pondering their failure that you find the message that was really left for you. Because to hear something new, first you have to set aside what you were expecting.
—-
small change
I ended up spending a good few hours with the box of letters I pulled out yesterday in the middle of organizing my office space. My first impulse was to toss most of these letters, to unburden myself of the past. But, since I had trouble recalling the faces and voices held in these pages, it seems that the past has already unburdened itself of me.
—-
the cassandra pages
I dream a volcano beneath a familiar lake
water rising, red fire in the rocks.
Tell my poet-friend, “we must go quickly!”
“Good luck,” he replies, shows me
the bionic implant in his back, his stitched skin —
suddenly it’s fatal to be real.
—-
Edible Detritus
Each day leaves us bereft and yet, unlike
The scattering trees, we hold on. There are
No ghosts. The dead can’t return. They never left.
—-
Mutating the Signature
Dana: My hair is wavy because in the story of my life, my hair is wavy today.
Nathan: Because of hair, my story is wavy today.
Dana: You are avoiding the capitalists. They are getting angry. Maybe they will go eat at Macaroni Grill to quell their collective — I mean completely individual — anger.
Look! I can put this whole pear in my mouth!
—-
The Rain in My Purse
The other day the forecast said “sunny and beautiful,” and the Wednesday Addams in me who likes kohl clouds and branches swooshing in the rain would like to ask “beautiful to whom?”
—-
box elder
And the land always looks so muddied and spent, so sucked bare by it. The stalks are wan ghostly things, they look like an indecipherable script, an attempt to write from a bad dream, something wanting but failing to be understood.
—-
Up!
I set down the sledgehammer,
push the rain out of my eyes.
Take another swing.
—-
Rock Paper Lizard
The squatter backed away from the tent, rubbing his arm. He didn’t look healthy. He looked toward the interpreter. The interpreter avoided his eyes, and, turning, discovered he was standing next to an ancient stump covered in very intriguing lichens. He leaned to examine them, and wondered if the young police officer had meant to strike the squatter so hard.
—-
