I've always been intrigued by human beings whose lives are lived just below and sometimes at the level of the clouds. They surround us by the thousands, the tens of thousands. In blue rooms, staring at TVs in their skyboxes. Doing Downward Facing Dog, 2,000 feet above the sidewalk.
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POEM: “Straight Up”
Baldwin's straight Campari. Drunk in sips, at least to my untutored palette. Yet, an intoxicating and challenging encounter. A confrontation, even. And Auden, he is distilled, too. In a different, yet an equal tour-de-force.
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POEM | “My Paragraph & I”
'I want my paragraph to strut, carved cane in hand, the Left Bank, like a proper boulevardier. I want my paragraph to wow you. leave you wanting more. To, if possible, make you gasp. To make you—prose willing—cry. And then, to laugh. And then to laugh at your crying ...'
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POEM | “Body of Evidence”
'I'd no excuse not to grok the fact, or traffic in illusions of not growing old. Or denial of encroaching senescence. Or flipping the bird at Mister Death. It would halt nothing of my body's fade, of our decay. I was, perhaps, whistling past my future graveyard.'
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POEM | “Nous Celeron”
'Don’t you, Nous Céleron,/wish to lay down your arms?/Enter the Ohio’s cool darkness,/or the Chinodahichetha!/Sounding out each syllable/as a Wyandotte/might utter them .../
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POEM | The Pledge
We must imagine/a better country, after/the orange man in/the white house. Tote/our losses & our/wounds. Revelations/about our neighbor’s/secret selves. The sign,/the flag, rippling in/the wind. That says—/'Off with your head’ ….
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POEM | “Fridays”
I mark out my life in the passage of a flood of Fridays, the signposts zooming by in Friday cat posts by a favorite blogger.
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A Hundred Years of Silence
It should be recalled/most of human history/has been lived in silence.
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PORCH POEMS: ‘Ms. Nature & Mr. Death’
So, my day, which when fortunate,/begins with coffee, cat, and dawn,/shifts at some point, to the deck, for some sitting beneath the same old sky,/only this time, eyes closed./Climbed up on the shore, out of thetumultuous stream of thought./I’ve yet to grasp the meaning/of your collaboration, Ms. Nature,/with your ally, Mr. Death.
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PORCH POEMS: ‘Overhead’
‘The clouds don’t care,’/ he said. Blowing a puff / of cigar smoke at me/ from across the porch. / I sent a pretty good / smoke ring back his way./ We were not / six feet apart, so could/ be killing each other, should / the virus hitch a ride upon our exhalations ...
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OP-ED LIMERICKS: “Toady,” “Move Quickly,”“Fauci,” & “ Canary Meet Coal Mine”
When all else fails in trying to understand the current American political regime, there's always the art of the Op-Ed Limerick. A new collection of four recent animations.
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A LOOK BACK: When Elephants Walked in West Virginia
You may not believe it. I would well understand should you not. The querulous mind dances lightly upon the phrase—and then rejects it utterly. There have never been elephants in West Virginia. But you would be wrong. Oh, so wrong.
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IT’S A MOTHER’S DAY THING: One Rant, One Song, One Memoir
She had the greenest of thumbs, a bright intellect and dreamed of being the kind of writer that Toni Morrison, a hometown contemporary, became. What to do when your mother — in the late stages of Alzheimer's — is moving mutely toward her departure from this life?
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Pandemic Memorial Video Project: may7.2020
A couple of weeks ago, they began appearing. Brief, heart-wounded, heartfelt memoriams on Twitter. They note the passing of mothers, fathers, grandparents, kids. I began to screen capture some of them. I wasn't sure why.
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‘WHAT IF YOU KNEW HER?’: The Protest 7 Years after the Kent State Massacre 50 Years Ago
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, in which four students were gunned down on May 4, 1970. As a student journalist, I profiled a protest seven years later on the Kent campus, where the memories remained raw and more than a thousand converged to protest.
