an inquiry

Have you ever hoped to be haunted, 

to be in the presence of one that is gone?

Has the ghost of your grandmother lingered 

a while as I selfishly hope mine does?

Did the cold touch of the spectre at

hand ever warm your bones?

whaddya know

Nobody ever whispers the answer into
your ear.
There is little solace in the unknown.
All the gods returned the
letters written to them.
Science has us in the dark.
There is little comfort in the unknown.

If everything seems hollow,
empty, and alone
there is little comfort in the unknown.
We have gathered all our
brightest in a room to discuss
how we now know
there is no comfort in the unknown
but we search and forage for
fragmented truths, piecing it
together - this puzzle - in effort
to see, to understand, to grasp
the unknown.

Every variable sings life,
the constants are not
that which we perceived,
and light always fades,
shining with dim pallor
into the void of the unknown.

morning meditations

6:00 AM holds no truth. 

7:00 AM is washed in sun.

8:00 AM is bathed in coffee.

9:00 AM is when we surface

to breathe the day into

lungs weak from the bite

of crisp, high-altitude dreams.

Dirt & Doggerel

The timbre of the phrase

excites me, brings the 

language to life.

Some silly Hudibrastic

will send me searching

anew for well-wrought

sentences in the midst 

of Hemingway's descriptions

rendering a mere 

 picador a hero. 

Sonnets, roundelay, haiku;

my interest wanes at

the confident poet's sad

interpretation of Spenserian

majesty, of T.S. Eliot's

vision, or of Bukowski's

fine and oft mimicked

outlook on the art.

This is visceral though

and I must roll the words

around, get a taste for it,

chew it up, spit it back.

This is emotion spilled out. 

It's all blue and blood red,

seeping from life to paper

and then, finally, forgotten.

Ordered a Bowtie

I ordered a bowtie on the online. No returns. Looked like a good tie and the price was right, so there I was shopping for haberdashery on the internet.

It arrived as inconspicuously as possible, but the crime was blatant and it wasn't a pretty sight. It was a pre-tied, clip-in-the-back abomination.

There oughtta be a law against that kind of false advertising.

from ali : kickstart to the new year?

(shamelessly cutting/pasting recent writing from the personal blog)

I am pecking this out with painfully slow consideration on my aging iPhone, a stuttering thumb war for remembrance on a doll sized keyboard. Each word, too, is jarred by the interruption of a nose thrust into my elbow with clockwork regularity - a wet nose, alternately snuffling inquiry or suggesting with various degrees of forcefulness an alternative activity in the form of a much-loved and consequently tooth-pocked rubber ball.

The damp nose and equally damp ball belong to Chester. They are essential parts of his evening routine, a routine consisting primarily of loose-limbed ambling from one room to the next, broken by sudden spasms of gymnastic, clawing energy aimed nose and teeth first at the unsuspecting ball or an unsupervised pair of rolled up socks or that most treasured of fleeting toys, the stray leaf snatched discreetly mid-toilet breaks or tandem walks. Acorns, too, and fraying bits of stick are smuggled in - and once, nearly, a dried out mud dauber nest - cherished contrabands, deliciously forbidden diminutive playmates to be tucked away innocently between paws and carpet when he raises a self-conscious gaze to meet my silently laughing one.

It is this almost human gaze that surprises me the most, seeing comprehension and strangely familiar emotions now flickering in mute eyes that were once just bright little brown buttons of generic puppy cuteness, as broadly adorable as those on a grocery aisle Hallmark card.  They have become pointed with personality, at times conveying unmistakeable boredom as he throws head down on paws and sidles out a heavy sigh and sideways shrugging glance towards and then immediately away from my deeply uninteresting human busyness; at others, taut with accompanying full-body alertness, following every sway of a toy dangling in mid-air before its inevitable fling across the room or field; illumined with utter unspoiled happiness too in these moments, and always roaming the hope of them at me later, offering the argument with a nudge and peaked eyebrows that surely there is nothing more joyful in life than playing. (About which he may be right).  To be fair, too, they can infuriate me, crackling with unmalicious but exultant defiance as he dances just beyond the reach of a confining leash or reprimanding hand - but when, or rather if, the hand has finally made its point, they are quickly downcast, only tentatively tossing upward the apologetic and heart-melting hope for restored favor... which is of course never slow to follow.

And lastly, the all important look - the one I am getting now, unwavering and urgent and often accompanied with vocal reinforcement if ineffective - the look that says it is time to visit the giant doggie toilet we humans laughingly refer to as a front yard.

"Coming home"

I need help with this. I'm not completely happy with it, but I can't exactly say why. Maybe I say too much? Need to leave more to the imagination? Or is it all too out of context? Thoughts and criticisms are appreciated, I am not a good fiction writer (yet, anyway).

His feet barely rose from the hard ground.

“Stand tall,” they used to snap. “Don’t shuffle,” they’d say. “Lift your steps high.”

But that was when his hair was dark and thick and waving in the wind, when his back was straight and his eyes bright and his heart full of hope and love and promise for the future.

That was years ago. Decades ago.

The old man shuffled slow, now, puffs of dust rising from under boots worn and cracking and caked with the mud and dust of mile upon weary mile. His back bowed under a faded and patched sack, only half full. Strands of gray, thin hair escaped from his shapeless hat.

Now he came to a crossroads, where the dirt road crossed a paved highway. A truck rattled by, breaking the quiet. The old man paused, looking one way and another. He shielded watery eyes against the glare of the midday sun, to where the highway disappeared in the curve of the horizon.

The road was empty again.

“It’s the same road,” he said softly, looking at the ragged-coated dog at his side. “The same road, but it’s not the same, somehow. It’s all grown up…”

He trailed off. The dog whined. But when he looked back there was nothing there. Just dirt and weeds and sunshine and an abandoned stone house, crumbling back into the earth.

He crossed the road.

***

She sat motionless in the recliner in the front window, face turned full into the sunlight, hands resting in her lap. A blanket was tucked around her feet.

A clock ticked loudly from the mantel, beside a framed wedding picture of a girl with straight, black hair and a boy with piercing eyes. The picture was old, yellowed even under the glass.

“I’ll be fixing your lunch now,” the nurse called from the kitchen, but the old woman did not stir. The nurse watched her from the doorway, then reached for the phone.

Still the old woman looked into the sunlight with unseeing eyes, hands folded. She felt the warmth, but long ago she stopped seeing it. But as the world around her grew dim, things far away became clear.

How long had it been since she took up her post in the window, watching and waiting? But she was young then, the boy a child. Always she sat there in the afternoons, watching for him to come home from school, she told him, but everyone knew different. And the years passed and the boy grew into a man and still she watched.

“Either he’s dead or he found himself some far-away woman and isn’t ever coming home,” a young woman told her aunt one summer afternoon when the two passed on the street. “And there she is, still watching. It’s time someone told her the truth.”

But the older woman shook her head.

“He didn’t forget her. Never did a man love a woman the way he did her. Death took him for sure.”

And they did tell her, each in turn, walking gravely up the walk to her front porch. They told her it was their duty, that she was clinging to false hope, that it was time to accept what God had willed.

And she’d listen and nod with gravity and refill their glasses and show them to the door.

And she refused to wear the black of mourning.

But she never told them that at night she looked for him, running over far-away beaches in her mind, searching among the bleached bones half-buried in the sand. She searched through jungle vines, peered into vacant eyes of countless men on crowded city streets. And on some dark nights when her spirit was heavy, she searched lamp-lit homes in case someone had stolen his heart from her, too.

But she never found his bones among the others, and so she clung to hope.

Now she was old, and long ago she stopped speaking of him. But still she watched. Some people wondered if she even knew what she waited for.

But this day was different. Her anxiety was palpable. Even the nurse kept glancing out the window, wondering what the old woman knew.

She couldn’t see the robins scratching at the soft earth after last night’s rainfall. But now she saw him in her mind. And now she watched his slow progress, watched him pause at the crossroads, watched his foot catch on a rut in the old road. And with each step she willed him forward.

And when he turned off dirt road and his boots crunched on gravel, she stood, her feet following paths worn deep into her memory. She stepped out the door, down two steps, along the narrow walk, out onto the road. She stumbled forward, arms outstretched. The sun was hot on her face.

A car swerved around her, someone laid on the horn. And now the world around her was intruding, and she couldn’t see him anymore. She wavered, legs trembling. She couldn’t remember which way to go. She felt the tears come; she was too weak to stop them.

And then she felt his presence, smelled his sweat and heard his footsteps. And the old man’s steps were lighter, when he took her arm in his and turned her back, toward the old house.

“I told you I’d come home again,” he said the words soft.

***

The son walked quickly through the kitchen, to the front room where she sat day after day.

But her chair was empty and the front door stood open. And on the old porch swing he saw them, the old man’s arms wrapped around her. Both were smiling, and the years had rolled away, and he recognized his own face in the old man’s, and wondered how he missed his mother’s beauty all these years.

“Mother?” he asked, but she did not speak again.

“What did I tell you?” the older aunt asked her niece, now graying herself, at the funeral. “Such a wedding that was, years and years ago. I was just a child but even I could see the way he worshiped her.”

And when the sod laid back over the fresh-dug dirt and the chairs packed away and the flowers moved back to the house where he had played and grown, the son stood alone at their grave, reading words scrawled across pages of old and faded notebook paper, on the back of receipts and envelopes, on drawing paper and blank-paper books with the spines cracking: Words that told of a lifetime of coming home.