You’re familiar, of course, with the tissue guards that grace the title pages and illustrations in many old books. Like veils on faces and mists in the grove, they protect what is tender and innermost more surely than any fence or wall, or lock and key. If we are to know anything, or anyone, we must understand the connection between hearts and fingertips. Love thrives by its very weightlessness. A […]
Two impressions met in the wind; each asked where the other had been; caught in a glance, both said; and passed again. Impressions Year upon year, fall upon fall, the maple leaves on the path remind me of hands. And one must die to know what it is to be held that way — die to the branch, die to the stem, die to the light, die to the […]
Piano Master, what of the keys that go untouched? For the sake of these, we must conceive of silence. Songs and Letters, February 16, 2007 Another Song I Know, Cosmopsis Books, 2007 Also appeared in Barbaric Yawp
Enough mist to say the page could be a street the day the way fingers please a face Recently Banned Literature, October 26, 2013
Leaves in the fall — and you still cling to the notion of perfection and flaw? October 17, 2019
There was one leaf which seemed to know the best, and so taught falling to the rest. And love’s been naked ever since. Love’s been naked, and that is all we need confess. October 14, 2019 I Could Fall for You I could fall for you, like the first leaf, before falling is fashionable, when everyone else is still clinging and green and oblivious to change. I could fall […]
Such beautiful apples! Which shall I bring home? I bend the bough. I pick the sun.
We live in a world inhabited by giant sequoias thousands of years old. This is true wealth. If I had not grown up near them, visited them, gazed upon them, put my hands on them, and taken their very breath deep into my lungs, I would not be this person; I would be someone else. Yes, we can, and should, say this of all living things, great or small. We […]
The weather turns cold, and here I am with my books again — the book of fallen leaves, and of the cloudless night and bright moon — the book of wordless days, and of the failing light in my work room — and glad I am, love, you will be home soon. October 9, 2019 A Warm Muffin and a Fresh Ripe Orange Imagine loving silence and solitude so […]
Though he doesn’t look like him, he reminds me of someone in Jerusalem, chanting in rooster’s voice behind the tomb, ’mid incense-cloud in cage-like room, Spirit moored in tattered robe, soiled well along the road, with dandruff, food, and candle wax, a kind of holy grime and filth, or prophet’s gold, Where I met him in the gloom, when again I was as now, not quite young and almost old, […]
