“Sorry” Isn’t Enough

You don’t hear the expression “sackcloth and ashes” much these days. From the Book of Daniel, the expression refers to the custom of wearing crude material and covering yourself with ash to express humility at a religious ceremony. Its colloquial meaning, however, is to be publicly penitent, to be sorry and chagrined and so desperate [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Memory

I rode gravity on my bike, down to where life proliferated in a drainage ditch. Waterbugs spotted pylons— their black ovals like tar cast to catch hold. Amidst the algae, they were obsidian, holes in light. I couldn’t count them even if I knew how. I would have found them moving, mounting the water to [...]

Starting Fires

Recently, I heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak on the Bush Administration’s “cooperative” relationship with American corporations and their lobbyists. Corporations, Kennedy argues, are busy sidestepping and ignoring legislation aimed at reducing pollution and are important participants in efforts to dismantle environmental protection. A book by Kennedy with the inflammatory title Crimes Against Nature: How [...]

Finds: What Am I Looking At?

The vast majority of the photos on my blog are found, not made, and photography is a largely unexplored area for me. I thought it might be fun this week to explore the web for photographs, specifically abstact photographs. What started me on this journey was Candleday, which you’ll discover in my blogroll and here. [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Greta

Today’s pallid sun stands at the window, searching for shadows inside and, finding nothing, dims nearly to dying. Still, it’s afternoon, day will drag hours into night. At the table she turns paper in her hands watching script snake back on itself—she’s not reading. She’s waiting. The door will open. Something will return at last.

Caffeine Nation

Standing in line at Starbucks yesterday, I suddenly remembered my brother’s description of morning in Disneyland. He told me how each resort sells a “bottomless mug” and at dawn, long before the children raise their sleepy-winkers, the adults drift toward the cafeteria as if it were an alien mothership, clutching their mugs, stupefied, but compelled [...]

Haiku Sonnet: What Will Abide

You say we’ll be here until the last drop of rain— Is that forever? Of all things hidden, water is the best disguised— showing up from air to slick the outside of a cold glass or wringing itself from cactus much too tough to weep. The rain can slow to nothing and then pour. You [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Dreaming of Flight

The airport’s gates are just for departures. Faces resign to leave, hands lifting half aloft in sleepy goodbye. No one takes belongings or notes destinations. Numbers are abstract again, and, besides, the few left behind wait to follow. We kiss and hug, our habits harder to give up, but skies open and invite us at [...]

Finds: Poetry in Motion

I’m well behind the wave in discovering YouTube, but this week I visited just to put in odd terms and see what came up. With poetic forms on my mind, I tried some, and I found these three videos. What I like about YouTube is its democracy. These run from polished to amateur, but all [...]

How’d We Do Coach?

One of my colleagues said to me recently, “When it comes to coaching, you do what’s been done to you,” but I prefer not to see it that way. I have a conversation with the coaches I remember. Coach Beauchamp wants me to explain the physiological effect of the workout. Coach Lopez wants me to [...]