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Finding the Diary

Settling the estate, the lawyer said. It seemed too grand a way of putting it— bills to be paid, a bank account to close, and finally her mother’s house to sell while her own, half-a-continent away, sat waiting for her with its lights on timers and neighbors dropping in to feed the fish. . . . . Continue Reading »

Wisteria

Here it comes again, after shimmering dead all winter, stretching, flexing, limbering, unleashing hordes of feather-cut leaves that look like dragon tongues, a silty river bronze, before they flatten to assume their summer-long, grass-emulating green. Gone in a few . . . . Continue Reading »

God’s Affable Principle of Cohesion

I Merely the look of it, buttercup at the edge of the “Lawn Falls” where the water seeps, sweeps down to the seaside is enough to carry the viewer in awe over the edge of reason to a logic beyond the modest mundane: the rocks being pitted are jointed by torrents of balm-like uproar. Love’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Old Havana

. . . pongee-colored girls in white dresses the sun shone through in multiple haloes where they lay alongside streets like sofas reading José Martí behind potted ferns in avenue-knolls paved with Key West grass and long-leaved tobacco shaved and scented like bark strips. . . . . Continue Reading »

Ut Pictura Poesis

The St. Jo River whirling full around the South Bend rich and dark as a negresse en chemise bedaubed with cochineal: mauve, purple tinting the water from the Odilon Redon sun setting. As we drove, the sunset fell over “The Goats” in Peru, Indiana and a crescent moon came up the color of . . . . Continue Reading »

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