Tag Archives: writing
A lineage of place
To Mark and Oliver, who moved, and to Molly, who died. To the young woman who traded her name for a husband, and honeymooned here. To Ruth, who brought her losses, and let them float away in warm and gentle water: May you be well. Each had written in the worn journal left on […]
Food chain
If you feed wild birds long enough, you begin to feel as if you are doing something important. Especially during the winter, when the mercury flirts with zero and every natural food source is blanketed in snow, the birds come to depend on your largesse. In return, they reliably offer pleasures only sporadically available in the realm […]
If you could
The ghosts of fawns haunt roadways where countless, careless cars ruined their immaculate forms, where does stood vigil, bewildered by their sudden stillness. The ghosts of fawns are prey in secret gulches, they are tufts of coarse fur, they are bleached bones, they are perfect cloven hooves small as your thumb. Your hand, your […]
A lineage of place
To Mark and Oliver, who moved, and to Molly, who died. To the young woman who traded her name for a husband, and honeymooned here. To Ruth, who brought her losses, and let them float away in warm and gentle water: May you be well. Each had written in the worn journal left on […]
The cows come home
at last, from others’ far-flung pastures, where the grass seemed greener for a season. And regard me with their soft eyes, their damp noses, their giant gentle bodies, tented flanks hollow with the long journey, their many stomachs rumbling. They are more beautiful than I remembered. I have waited so long, all these years […]
Yard
I love each plant too much, but not blindly. I’m aware of their redemptive force, how they came to be here partly from my need for correction of some mysterious but fatal error I made in ancient time, before memory — not just the discrete failure to care for those two grand old trees, but some bigger and unforgivable mistake. For years, I have dreamed sporadically that I have murdered some unknown person and been found out, that I have irreparably taken another’s life and ruined my own.
A vulnerability meets a provocation
Like a cliché or a bad joke. In a bar. Where they recognize but cannot name each other until it is too late. For the vulnerability, anyway. You know the rest. The vulnerability becomes more himself, soft as a fontanel. Exposed. The provocation likewise expressing her nature. Inciting; advancing. Until – at the same […]
Rookies
“Ball!” barks the guy behind the mound. It’s the first practice of the high school season so there’s no one calling pitches at the plate. Everything is casual. This guy – the coach or maybe a father, a ball cap hiding his thinning hair, his gut doughing over his waistline – is sighting the ball […]
Elvis and the birthday not celebrated
It’s been 83 years today, and I’m thinking of a sleepy-eyed, full-lipped boy born in East Tupelo to a ne’er-do-well daddy and a hard-working mama. Not the boy who wound up king of rock ‘n’ roll, but the one who wound up in a shoe box beneath unmarked earth. It was a couple of hours before […]
My inner Sally Field
For the past few decades, I have behaved ungraciously toward Sally Field, though I know this must hurt her deeply. Part of it — I admit — is her near-pathological perkiness, the cheery combustibility of the ever-smiling small woman. Makes you wonder, you know: Just what is she up to? But if I’m honest, […]
Meditatio Ephemera 