When I was in high school I underwent one of those sea changes that sweep through us. My mother was hospitalized for a time for treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder, my dad lost his job, we made weekly trips down to the church’s food pantry, and eventually my parents separated. The real weight of it occurred during my senior year. One of the interesting things that came out of this was the freedom to leave […]
One day I looked Hafiz straight in the eye (his left if you must know) (my right) with the full faith and undeniable force of forty beleaguered years of human existence on this little planet of ours, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is clearly going right down the same unsanitary tube as the one that we now call an asteroid belt, and I said half-jokingly, “Tell me the first thing that comes to mind.” […]
Two, three—call it four decades on, and I’m both better and worse. I’ve settled into it in the way that precedes disappearance, as if I was placed in the back of an otherwise empty cabinet, sheltered by the presence of wood, where I’ve become a study in knowing something more that you can only glimpse in the repair of oily machinery, or the bailing of water from a low spot on the land where two surveyors […]
They said once, in the papers, they found sea shells in the Rocky Mountains. To minds so disposed, these findings– like all such mockeries of the mundane– sparked a series of concomitant revelations. I know this because Hafiz pinned me to the wall, told me to hold quite still, and then cordoned my life– which suddenly felt like a pop-up trailer with ten thousand doors– into endless sectors of moonlit bedrock and crushed eons. We […]
Here in the Meanwhile, on the shores of Forever dotted with the charcoal stumps of forgotten fires, the mossy walls of collapsing wooden shanties and various debris of antiquity, such as: half-buried edges of glass, torn diary pages, ice picks, the bones of dead birds bleached by the sun, and a curious face caught in sepia, the faint notes of song drift past on the breeze, pastel tones that have nowhere else to go and so […]
Embracing Forever 