February 2012
2 posts
I Tell Her
I tell her: we must get at the ground,
deep beneath the dirt, where the roots are.
Only here can we make ourselves strong;
here, where our proofs and reasons lie, buried.
We must separate the wheat from the chaff,
we must harvest only good things.
Remember how we want our lives to feel:
like drunkenness; gentle and warm,
eyes cloudy with God and smoke,
with the beauty of cold...
The Funeral
My father drove the little wooden cross
into the ground, and I wondered,
at age eleven, if it was sacrilege:
burying the rabbit we had found
torn apart by a crow in the yard,
its small heart still now,
its fur and ears mangled with blood and dirt.
We even said a prayer, I think,
my mother bowing her head
as a car shot down the alley,
kicking up dust.
My father walked away,
...
January 2012
2 posts
Running
“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
-Shakespeare
The common denominator that all young people share may be the idea that we know more than we do. I say this as a young person, and although I have been told I am actually sixty-four and stuck inside a young person’s body, I know that in reality I am simply a twenty-one year old in a...
December 2011
1 post
Thoughts on Sacraments
“A sacrament is an outward sign of God’s love, they taught me when I was a boy, and in the Catholic Church there are seven. But, no, I say, for the Church is catholic, the world is catholic, and there are seventy times seven sacraments, to infinity.”
-Andre Dubus
This past summer, I read a collection of essays by the late writer Andre Dubus. He was one of the great short...
November 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Wanting to Live
First it was my grandmother, then you.
Old age and suicide.
They are different, but they are the same;
the dying doesn’t feel right.
Unlike Sexton, I don’t have the lust for it,
not even the timid acceptance.
“It is a swamp of loss and despair,” a friend said,
“Others are bogged down in it,
but we go along, as if nothing has happened,
thinking everyday that...
1 tag
“Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we...”
– Andre Dubus
1 tag
“Everything that happens is from now on.”
– Bon Iver
October 2011
6 posts
1 tag
Late
“After all, he said to himself, it’s probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”
-Ernest Hemingway
It is after midnight, but early. As a child, my mother would put me to bed promptly at 8:30, and because I was afraid, she would leave the hall light on, and my bedroom door open. Looking back, I don’t know how I slept those nights; today it is impossible for me to sleep with...
1 tag
Al Stewart/Norman Maclean
For her, I leave these old records,
These yellow books behind.
She wants cigarettes for dinner,
So we picnic on the porch,
Admire the parking lot prairie
Across the street.
She asks me why she feels
This way:
Strewn like gravel,
Coming apart and
Splitting like straw.
I point.
I tell her,
Look for the place between the trees.
Imagine it runs through you.
(2010)
First Post!
In the past, I have had college professors encourage me to start a blog as a means of honing my skills as a writer. Their assertion was that blogging encourages an individual to write on a regular basis and also introduces writers to the idea of putting their work out there for the entire world to read. Chances are that next to no one will be reading anything you write, but that’s the...
1 tag
“the tigers have found me, and I do not care.”
– Charles Bukowski
July 2010
2 posts
Six Feet Under! →
1 tag
“Everything’s bad for something.”