I should not have waited.
It would have been better
To have slept and dreamed,
Than to have watched night pass,
And this slow moon sink.
10/10/22
10/7/22
The Clothes Pin - Jane Kenyon
How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better
to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line
with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!
9/24/22
Next Second, You Were Gone - Randall Stephens
I heard about an old broken phone box
Where people would go to have imaginary conversations
At first, I found it foolish
And then I joined the queue.
Where people would go to have imaginary conversations
At first, I found it foolish
And then I joined the queue.
When my turn came, I dialled your old number.
There was no ringtone, but I told you everything
and I waited in silence
as if you might respond.
I thought I heard you breathe.
Then I remembered they told me my life should go on.
One second, you were here.
9/4/22
7/12/22
The Derelict - Sharon Olds
He passes me on the street, his hair
matted, skin polished with grime,
muttering, suit stained and stiffened—
and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a
sign of beauty and power. But his hands,
strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and
flap slightly as he walks, like hands of
someone who has had polio, hands
that cannot be used. I smell the waste of his
piss, I see the ingot of his beard,
and think of my younger brother, his beauty,
coinage and voltage of his beard, his life
he is not using, like a violinist whose
hands have been crushed so he cannot play—
I who was there at the crushing of his hands
and helped to crush them.
8/31/21
The Great Gulf - Richard Shelton
Between us and you there is a
great gulf fixed: so that they
which would pass from hence to you
cannot; neither can they pass to us,
that would come from thence.
Luke 16:26
1
At night when each dark shape in the desert
glows in the light of its own penumbra
I take the road by one white hand
and lead it to a deep arroyo, a dry wash
in which the river lives when it is home.
Stones remain where the water dropped them
and beneath them aged scorpions sleep
in small hotels with no view at all.
The sand is cool. I wonder if the river
will be here when I need to drown.
2
We choose from what is available and fall
in love: anchorites with spiders, sailors
with each other; the bleeding foot
returns to embrace the shattered glass;
the overdose goes in search of an addict;
and those who are too much afraid
fall in love with their fear.
3
I was broken by love but I was
so well repaired I can pass for anybody,
standing here where a river used to be.
In one hand my prayers, in the other the answers,
with a great gulf fixed between them.
To get here I dragged my shadow
over sharp stones and felt its cuts
and bruises. But the river was dry.
Oh Jesus Christ
and all my fingers losing their rings!
What will become of me when I offer
my soul to the Devil and he doesn’t
want it? What will I do
when there is no one left to betray?
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