A Little Boy’s Epitaph
Here is the marble, and here is the hand that held it just so, and aimed. April 13, 2021 . [ 1075 ]
Tag Archive for ‘Epitaphs’
Butterflies and Bee Toes
Am I being vague? I don’t mean to be. I love words. And they love me. We’re naturally hesitant, wondering, each time we meet, who will be the first to speak. What should we mean? We aren’t nails hammered through wood. We’re more like butterflies, or bees with pollen on our toes. Documents? Manifestos? We laugh. We can’t all be bibles or epitaphs. Some of us must be free. Recently […]
Saved
The sound of rain. The blessèd certainty of it — think as I will, believe as I will, act as I will, the rain will fall on my grave, and that is a blessing too: a blessing to the stone, should I have one, a blessing to the soft green grass that grows over me. And for an epitaph, these two words will do: Listening. Still. May they describe you. […]
Opposites
Living shadows, and the solid dreams they cast — The cedar and the lamp post, the school boy and the cloud: The perfect shroud — as if Cain had smiled at Abel, And Abel — had wept — and bowed. . [ 904 ]
Long Gray Train (I Pay the Porter)
I woke up in the middle of the night needing a sip of water. I walked down the hall, and as I passed through the dark sitting room, a sentence sprang to mind, or the beginning of a sentence — a phrase, a breath, a sound, a combination of sounds — a powerful suggestion, insistent, dreamlike, meaningful, profound, but I didn’t have the focus to pick up a pen and […]
Here Lies
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man — I wonder how many years have passed since I read this story aloud to my wife in the kitchen of the house we were renting at the time. Twenty? Twenty-five? The reading ended in tears — mine. And even then, it was not the first time I had read the story. Had Dostoevsky written nothing else, his mission on earth would have been […]
Transitions
The hush of a forest. The sanctity of an old cathedral. A freeway through the graveyard of an unknown people. And here is the place where Love buried her sweet shy kitten. See the neon epitaph — Even grief wears a mask — As bright grows the sky where it’s bitten. [ 836 ]
Epitaph
Love is light in the palm of the beloved, and a bee’s in the dew on the rose. June 30, 2019 Epitaph what strange liquor is this? who poured it into my glass? why do I love its flavor? why can I not resist? Songs and Letters, October 12, 2006 Another Song I Know, Cosmopsis Books, 2007 [ 437 ]
When Last In the Dooryard
Bury me with the old gray hat. Let it rest on my chest and cover my hands, that each new spring may imagine them. When Last In the Dooryard Now the lilac’s in bloom. Have y’noticed how flowers use their voices, And how some need only whisper To be heard? Recently Banned Literature, April 26, 2018 [ 364 ]
