with apologies to Clive James ("Whitman and the Moth ( Read more... )

Nightmare last night: someone rushing in to tell us very bad news about Gary, right when choir was warming up for the 9:00 service. People were gasping for breath as if they got hit in the solar plexus, sitting down as if their legs turned to jelly. In the dream i could hear the floor creak and the sound of breath hurting in human lungs ( Read more... )

I love a challenge. But sitting on the stairs to the balcony during choir practice, penciling in chords and erasing them again, when I'm supposed to be singing, feels like a bizarre and tedious chore ( Read more... )

dump out last night's coffee, rinse, pour in new. i see you always walking away, your back to me, cellphone to your ear. the shadows of the bones in your wrist. the strand of hair you absentmindedly keep pulling out from under your phone. tailored shirt, bluejay songs, slanting sunlight, pool of cold coffee glittering toward the manhole cover. ( Read more... )

She would sway in front of us, a willow tree, fronds touching the grass. Sweeping over words spoken too many times. I was afraid of her; I didn't want her ideas in my head. Later I learned she was burned out. Best days were long behind her, years before I first heard her speak. In a book I read she appeared as a dowdy character, impossible, badly ( Read more... )

Onlookers lined the dusty street ( Read more... )

Onlookers lined the dusty street ( Read more... )

I no longer mind
Being left behind

Though it used to be
The Worst

Now I just leave
First

Maybe in that other world
You're me, and I am you.

The best mirror is a good friend.
When we're face to face
I pretend: even is odd,
No is yes, now is then.

Going is coming home, the end
Is the beginning.
Right is left, after is before,
Loss is joy. Less is More.

-> enw

ever since the day
when i communed with my first
saint i've thought

how bedtime
will never be the same
nor waking neither

do you remember
your first visitation?

the covering wings,
unbearably pleasant,
that also make you sneeze?

for Matt Harmon