“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
He has died or should have three or four times by his reckoning but come back to spin like a lucky top in his storytelling, this recital of 23 bones broken in a T-bone in Alabama, an 8 inch screw fixing his hips in line and a scar the curving length of barbed wire he showed me by hoisting his shirt to prove how well it had healed. He […]
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I have his words, only, decades old. How close is possible? Not within his neurons firing across synapses. Not riding his adrenaline when it happened. I can see the woman and boy on a porch watching the crew, watching him. A special Pennsylvania July in the tropics kind of hot in farm country. The orange dump truck, the t-shirted, helmeted crew smoking, the painted line unrolling. He is tall and […]
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In mid-January, two red slashes like scarves arrived in darkness, suspended in the air above the marshes outside the city. One man at a tolling station who often stood idly watching the procession of planes descending, dropping into the airport in an orderly declivity, one, and another, then another, said they appeared without any detonation or flares, as if someone had said “Now”. He looked for a helicopter throwing off […]
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A final note on what I’ve learned about poetry by writing it. I make no claims for the quality of my own poetry. This is just what writing it calls to mind. Poetry feels like writing forced through multiple filters. That is true of all writing. Filters are meant to remove impurities, extraneous mush, that which does not belong. But prose operates with both addition and subtraction, with both purification […]
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