The rules of chaos are simple: A mountain is never a perfect cone. A lake is never really a circle. A drop of dew is not a microcosm. No. Flowers wither. Dust collects. There is the relentless return of what we do not want. Everything inclines to disorder. But then how . . . . Continue Reading »
That the world should end in an orgy of pain was inconceivable at my conception in the Panama Canal Zone where the hydraulic locks were emblems of the unity of oceans. But the hydraulic harmony was striated with tropical diseases and now cancer where was torrid procreation; day . . . . Continue Reading »
Q. Who made you? A. (Melissa Murphy, Age 10): Who makes me you should say! I co-creates me ev’ry day. My tender psyche I unlocks & with my mental pencil box I brightly crayons, without fault, My very very own gestalt & so I comes to be alert To all my pain & all my hurt & then when . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s been three days now. We continue to find splinters of rice clinging to our scalps; piercing no skin but adamant, predatory at the root. They will not be removed. Thinking back to the Mass we recall the smallest things—yellow neckties splashed with ciliated . . . . Continue Reading »
1. I start to dream I am waking and wake with a start from the dream. Shadows gather in the attic, in the hallways, bedrooms, walls: their smell, like gas, is everywhere. I start to dream I am waking . . . 2. Night falls, then falls again as if drunk, as if slipping on ice . . . . Continue Reading »
On card after card he sees it. Along with a harsh identity photograph And his preposterous signature, A black line struggling into a name. The face is Irish, and his name. And even some of the wallet cards, The printer prayer to St. John Neumann, Bohemian bishop in . . . . Continue Reading »
The name of the one organbuilder was Craft, the other Dream, both descendants of an ur-figure. Creation. To graft metal to wood, not to look askance at fanatics in the guise of shepherds, and to listen with both delicacy and might was required. A duration. Death . . . . Continue Reading »
It is harder to see what one seesthan anyone knowsbecause it is easier, far far easierthan on can suppose. That still point of the turning world—look! this light through the petal—where there are no shadowsand where it is never a problem never to have shadows,neither haunted by undaunted . . . . Continue Reading »
At the last rock of the last ledge of the last climb, retreat blocked, he went to the edge to look over his days and ways. The earth lay below in colors. He watched it with desire, but it was spread out far far below, and was unobtainable. At his foot was a green thing—a leaf, slick and . . . . Continue Reading »
Easy to forget, how shadows are light’s creatures, out of dark, out of thinning dark come delicately, then sharply. Sun puts them there. True to the last frond, bole, blowing crest, bush’s perimeter, by light shaped from darkness their elegant black duplications silent, accurate. On the hot . . . . Continue Reading »
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