If there was 1 word to characterize the spirit of the moment, it was Confidence
—David McCullough What I love about California is what the world loves about California & tho they say there is no […]
Place
Theodore Roosevelt never returned to Panama; he never saw the Panama Canal
—David McCullough The mind is an […]
Black Igloo
The shadows thrown by snowcaps here are thin as hose or onionskin, and what the clouds cast massive over town is not so proud that it won’t scatter once the South howls in. At two the street-lit lawn still squints our shades; by dawn the focal watts of sunshot want […]
The Prison Beneath the Pacific
How deep? Some six thousand meters, in meters. In light years it’s further than Vega. Deep as any man’s pride and then some— you can hear the Earth move her bowels. Men sink in a blue submersible: eight sets of restraints and an airlock that drops off new inmates like roe. There’s always an odd […]
Film Noir at Gallop Park, On the Edge
of suburbia in flux behind one of the town’s, count ’em, two mega high schools. The sometimes-tended-to nature preserve where green & green slide crisp between brisk handshakes, where a middle-aged Jimmy John’s driver suddenly halts his ‘98 Corolla, goes noiseless. Where the sun isn’t exactly booming, but it’s Sunday morning & I’m in my […]
Race to the Tree
1. I was 13 & it was night & without even knowing it, I had successfully evaded the Amherst police for 4, 5 hours. It was night & without having committed any crimes, I was pursued, looked into by the Amherst police. Well, perhaps I’d trespassed: scrambled up a […]
Elegy for My Sadness
Maybe the centipede in the cellar knows with its many disgusting legs why I am sad. No one else does. I want to be a sweetheart in every moment, full of goats & xylophones, as charming as a hill with a small village on it. I want to be a village full of sweethearts, as […]