Essays along the margins
I woke before an alarm, like a shorebird stepping in before the wave. That’s more natural: a piper is never caught by the curl. Those winged fingers flit him skyward if the crash and roil of the sea comes too close. He lives on the waters: not in them. He eats what the sea has offered, running along the …
Sometimes the easy way is quite the poorest way, however you or others might convince you otherwise.
The moon is overhead and filling every night, so bright the world can't sleep, but rolls from dusk to dawn, trees and human objects limned by its smiling sight; into its stillness a single person sails, his water the blue-lit road and ship his own two heels. Solitude the hull's name, it move at peace, …
At a birthday party the other night. A glass of wine, a meal, a toast, easy talk, genial anecdotes, a circle of laughter, good night. Somewhere along the thread of a conversation, one of the party-goers mentioned (wistfully, patiently, perhaps resignedly) that she was wondering when she would find "Mister Right". Anyone with some measure of intimacy with their own …
It is wonderful to sit out the sleepless night, which the fire of anger has lit! Like watching the full moon rise over a lake, or sun ignite the ocean: a little light comes, then more and more, until a new whole landscape is revealed, in spite of yourself. In the case of rolling and turning in your covers, …
Lately I have neither composed melody nor lyric, because music, however you follow its fragrance, requires the flower. Simple or complex, the blossom must open, the color be expressive and expressed: if that bud is all-potential, then the hand must wait for later summer, for more sun, for rain; and if the petals have stretched, …
My cats, of course, obey another set of spheres, and while I quiet into the solitude and the slightly muffled end of the day (even the blue TV glare has left the neighbor-houses, and the most convicted night birds have for the most part decided that sleep is good enough) as I write a few …
"Pois, deus virou vida, assim mesmo: virou gramado, virou ar, foi respirado, e apenas então aprendeu perder…" "Não diga." Meio-sorriso, rosto virado para que desconfiança seja oculta, perdida na sombra. "Digo, sim, querida. Digo sim. As terras foram secas, os lagos apenas buracos no pele da planeta, ocávo, esperando…" Mas não quis saber. Oferecí água; …
"Waiting is work." My father, on the telephone, waits for the return of my mother, away in Sweden. One fills her eyes with her history and with the world; one fills his eyes with the familiar and with a brief emptiness. But a small emptiness echoes the greater one, just as a shadow in the …
" Mountains did look in the windows of the thin aluminum room over loud tar paper roofs We could see how peaks covered with lime or snow backed away a little wounded from their literal distance " – Mary Kinzie I wondered, tonight, as the full moon flooded my room as it flooded the landscape …
In many conversations over the years I have found myself planted on one side of a fence, leaning in, looking over. And according to my companion's words — through words thoughts, in thoughts timber, trimmed timber rails, rails become fences, fences framed vision, in pictures a mirror of one's Self — there was a way …
A phrase often heard in physical training programs, from triathletes to bicyclists to climbers to yogis, is "working your edge." No matter what level of experience we have attained in a given sport, there is always a level of activity or mental acuity beyond that which we are familiar. There is always a more open …