Not So Nifty Fifty

I’ll be fifty in October.
Lately I’ve been saying that a lot, adding it onto statements as explanation, emphasis, authority, or excuse.  “I’ll be fifty in October,” I say, “and just can’t scale climbing walls anymore.”  Or I say, “This is the strangest running mate choice I’ve ever seen, and I’m turning fifty in October.”
The other [...]

Midnight in the Country

We walk a gray path
through night, the moon
tonight poorly suited
for illumination.
Everything just off
this path is
another dilution
of ink and—
from here—invisible.
Is that laughter
or your feet
shuffling stone?  Who
could make anyone
know any truth
out here?  The voices
aren’t ours, our
eyes snuffed out.

Empathy Challenged

“Writers don’t write from experience,” the poet Nikki Giovanni once said, “if you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”
As an African-American, Giovanni might feel an urge to communicate the seemingly incommunicable—what it is like to be in her skin. She may also feel the complementary [...]

Circling

A looped rope
lies on deck,
and the last
touches the first.
The middle
commingles.
Who’s to say
what repetition
means when we
can’t know echoes,
can’t know the ghostly
strands woven
of chance and fate?
A coil springs
from memory,
and the impulse
falls on itself.
The middle co-
mingles. What means
make ends when
ends are never last,
never climax
of chance and fate,
and never never?
The middle commingles.
A looped bit of music
insists on perpetuity
in memory.  [...]

Ambition vs. Desire

What do they say about wishes and horses?
Most people have plenty of wishes—they want to be rich executives, or famous performers, or skilled artists, or successful something elses, but fulfilling ambitions doesn’t rely on desire.  Success comes from action, and more than simply practicing or working hard.  While an author or actor or athlete might [...]

Gentrification

Down the shadowed end of my street, among
the false roof lines of new-built condos and
the fenced patches of pachysandra and boxwood
forbidden to dogs and people,
some of the older homes survive. Their shingles
sag, and the grass that grows claws its way into dirt
looking for water.  Those houses seem guests now—
shunned by politeness, supplicant somehow
to the stiff [...]

A Healthier Rat

On Olympic coverage the other day I heard the American marathoner Deena Kastor say that she doesn’t like the word “sacrifice” applied to all she must forgo or avoid. She prefers the word “choices.”  As an athlete, she understands what’s required to fulfill her ambitions and accepts the cost.
For the last three weeks, I’ve been [...]

Bhava and Vibhava: On Becoming

An instructor in a short story workshop in college once reminded me, “Be sure to write stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends,” and I remember returning to my dorm laughing with friends about this startlingly obvious advice.  I wondered how you might avoid following it.  Like so much advice I’ve replayed, however, I hear [...]

Not Your Father’s Olympics

For sports that go on unnoticed most of the time, the Olympic Games are a bonanza.  Over the next two weeks, I’ll be watching every moment of track and field available, just as I watched every second of the U. S. Olympic Trials, but I’m not fooling myself—the Olympics probably won’t present the best performances, [...]

For Charles Bukowski (and the man with beautiful eyes)

The following is a response to a challenge on Scot’s Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers to react to the video of the Charles Bukowski poem below. My response was posted there, but I thought I’d post it here as well, especially as Scot is bowing out of blogging.
His site has offered brilliant examples of [...]