The Confluence
Who was my mother in the sunlight as she stared into the confluence of the Blue and White Niles? Two ancient rivers joining—the conjunction point— now as one, flowing north. What kept her there—her staring— beyond the bright sun, as taxis left, the National Geographic photographer who was so friendly disappearing into his car, as the sun dipped and darkness shut without the usual red dusk of the Midwest? What was she thinking as she stood with her young daughter in a war-torn Sudanese country in 1959? Maybe it was our emergency landing in Addis Ababa or the recent death of my...
Read MoreEvening Light
Let’s meet where the tables are empty at 7. I can remember, and so do not have to imagine, the April evening light coming in off the bricks, through the glass rattled like snare skin by the bass thrum of busses and trucks on 65th. The tables round and black, they really are like pools of emptiness with glasses of water suspended by life’s magic antigravity effect, to say nothing of the orbits of planets, that successful reluctance to plummet into their suns, even when life may not have begun on most of them, there is no one to meet, no table taking the evening light back into...
Read MoreMy Love Commutes
Mornings when you have gone to work, my love, I fall into your dreams: rumble on your bus, feel the weight of your bag, nod my tired, stubbled cheek against a window. To bus hum, I snore softly, wire glasses slipping down my nose. When bus stops, I stretch strong arms, move slowly in heavy dress shoes down the aisle. And as you yawn more fully awake, I slip back into my own dreams. Still loving you, from here.
Read MoreDifficult, Tennessee
In memory of Tom Logue One day Tom and Ethel dropped their baby Louise by Ethel’s brother’s while driving through Tennessee. Making their way back to I-40, Pastor Tom saw a road sign for two nearby towns: Difficult 2 Defeated 4 Being a Baptist, he knew without ever visiting that somewhere there was bound to be a Difficult Baptist Church, a Defeated Baptist Church. He’d seen both, and being young, smart, and in love with all things ironic, he smiled and drove on. That was before muscular dystrophy claimed his oldest son Tommy at 18, before schizophrenia came to...
Read MoreZoom_3
photo by R.S. Carlson Coxa. Trochanter. Femur. Tibia. Tarsus… and four of the five named segments of mantis foreleg flare spines to pierce and grip whatever crawls, flies or falls too near. The foreleg segments hang – at rest – half-reminiscent of a monk at prayer, awkward exoskeletal sacramentals, broad and thick; they hang from what, for me, would be shoulders and, scissor-jointed twice, taper to what seem frail twigs dangling astray but, to hummingbird, beetle or honeybee too near, the tarsi prove stilettos swifter than eyes, single or compound, commonly track, and their small spurs...
Read MoreThe Spring in Michigan
From a stupor we unroll. April breaks her book open and the conte begins again. Our hero, flute-footed, arrives drunk from the party at Poussin’s; he says he’s forgotten the particulars but Pan was dancing with the lovely Bare. The great god was hoofing it with nakedness herself. In a phrase: Intent. His cloven limbs boreal and blunt against the Alchemical dew of spring. Cold unlimbering. The deer running between Cedar and lake. Easing and delicate, their obdurate hidings in sinew, shadow, and speed. They grip, with me, the sensual earth of abandoned celebrations. That’s a long way...
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