by
earth turns towards the sun
trees abandon their crisp leaves
the kidney wood blooms
the heat in texas
hangs heavily in the air
summer will not leave
lizards sprint sprightly
across the back patio
no rain for weeks now
they warn it will end
even now summer lingers
like a slow sickness
everything unfolds slowly
we are here then we are not
(September 22, 2025)
by
O the hell
we must breathe
with the dust
of redemption
as our ghosts whisper
— revising our past —
our skin glows
with angelic sweat
like saints gilded
in gold leaf
over brick arches
in byzantine cathedrals
all these obligations
we must attend to
as the day descends
and night grows
from shadow
nearby
(September 19, 2025)
by
I had a dream/nightmare this morning. I was returning to a teaching job at a high school where I taught English Literature and Composition 14 years ago. The dream began at an English Department meeting where we were being introduced to a newly purchased curriculum that emphasized teaching the students how to spell. The curriculum came with “can’t fail lessons” and lots of pre-made, easy to grade, worksheets. I was arguing against the program, of course. I tried to explain the benefits of teaching reading and writing through a workshop system, of course. No one was listening to me, or the presentation from the district, of course. Instead, the other teachers spent the time complaining about their students and the administration, of course. Richard, my friend, tried to calm me down, but I took it as he was just patronizing me to get me to shut up. The meeting broke up. I wandered the halls looking for my classroom. I realized that no one had shown me where I was supposed to teach. The halls were crowded. It seemed to be lunch, since no one was in any of the classrooms, instead they were milling about in the common areas. Teachers rushed about, overwhelmed. Students gossiped, politely ignoring me as I walked around the building, lost. I never should have come back to teaching, I thought. I should quit now, I thought. But I can’t quit. I need the money: If I quit, I won’t have any income, I thought. I kept walking around the building in a growing panic. I didn’t know where to go. I woke up, as I remembered that I was retired, that I had a pension, that I wasn’t teaching anymore. That I did not have to teach anymore. It was over. It was over.
(September 10, 2025)
by
This is how this story goes, or at least what I can remember from how Dad told it. I have probably told this story as many, if not more, times than my dad. Uncle Les had gone off to college in the late 1800’s. Every now and then a letter from him would arrive that first semester, and then they didn’t. My Grandfather Noel, Les’ brother, saddled up his horse and rode off to check on things. When he arrived, Les’ dorm room appeared as if Les had just walked out and would return any minute. He had been missing for several months. Then years later, around 1906, when my dad was three years old, a man came riding up to the “dirt” farm Noel struggled to eek a living from out near Liberty Hill. The man had two large saddle bags draped over his horse, two bandoliers criss-crossing his chest, and two large pistols hanging from his hips. The man was Uncle Les. After he dismounted, he walked into the house and hung his pistols from a peg on the wall. Les never touched those guns again. “Leave those guns alone, Ralph They’re nothing but trouble,” my Grandmother Pearl told the excited three year old. Les took his saddle bags out to the barn where he slept for the next 7 years as he worked for his brother on the farm for room and board. After seven years, Les took the almost forgotten saddle bags and bought a ranch out west. Even as children, we saw the holes in Dad’s story: Where did Les get the money for his ranch? Noel only paid him with food and a place to sleep. Where had Les been all those years after disappearing from his college? What had he been doing? After being gone for so long, why did he wait for seven years before he bought his ranch? What was in those two saddle bags? Was any of what Dad said over the years about Les true in any way? How much have I filled in the holes of my memory with conjecture?
(September 7, 2025)
by
He didn’t know how to act, and had no script to follow. She knew her part without book, and said all her lines with ease. This was, she pointed out, not her first time in this role. It was, he thought, a true love story, not just another chance for her to reprise a stock character. Repeatedly, she set the scene, hitting her mark, an easy cue to follow. Scene after scene, he vaguely wandered the stage, wishing he knew what to say; wishing he knew what to do; unable to act on his desires. She was confused. What was his motivation? Why wouldn’t he act? Why did he not respond correctly? Eventually, the farce ended as it began, without preamble, or resolution. Some one laughed in the wings, followed by a slow clap. Then, like a ghost, she left the stage, leaving him to ponder their performance alone, as the lights slowly faded past memory.
(September 5, 2025)
It’s rumored one sees
as you die one’s life.
What if what one sees
is the life as lived
unfolding in time
so fleeting, yet vast?
Each momentarily
a live memory
not a life once lived
but the life you have.
Then it disappears
as if in a dream
of which one forgets
without waking up.
(September 4, 2025)
My world, which Words have created,
has fallen into a deafening aphasia.
Increasingly,
as if rearranging letter blocks,
I misread words in the poem
Like “words” for “worlds—”or
“worlds” for “words—”
Just an aging typo of the mind.
Like a sailor blown overboard
into a raging sea, I cannot
swim within my thoughts,
cannot ride the wave’s surface
without tumbling into the foam
to drown without a lexicon.
(August 28, 2025)
by
The adage goes
To save for a rainy day,
But the rain doesn’t rain much
Anymore. When it does
I watch the grass, trees,
And flowers left dance,
A hollow ghostly dance.
I look around the circle;
To see ritual filled eyes
momentarily hope. We are
Lost. The moment’s all
That is left. Tomorrow’s
Too late. It rains
For hours. the air cools,
At least ‘til morning.
Nothing’s changed;
All is as it has been. Yet,
The streets dry quickly,
And the earth cracks
Open like an empty kiss
Bestowed upon a corpse
As a last blessing.
(August 22, 2025)
Memory, perpetually cloaked
in iridescent shadow, finds
itself a metaphor, becoming
along the way something
other, something momentarily
more accurate, than it ever was—
something easier, somehow,
in this moment,
to see
what was there once before,
to see
what was there all along.
As if instead of a tsunami
calmly obliterating the past
like a Japanese fishing village
washed clean from the shore
in a spasm of forgetfulness,
amnesia lifted thin silk veils
to reveal new aspects of time
no longer smothered beneath
the scent of stale mothballs
and the thick quilted layers
of familial consensus.
(August 18, 2025)
Inside the snake’s mouth
does the mouse hear
the snake’s jaw
articulate
his future silence?
Do you?
(August 16, 2025)
by
Ritual consoles
through repetitions solace:
“I’ve been here before.”
(August 16, 2025)
by
I’m tired of this life,
but not tired enough to die.
The sun rises, then falls.
(August 15, 2025)
by
“You should understand
the way it was
back then,
because it is the same
even now.”
from Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
Today I finished (for RFB) Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko. It reminded me of Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday in the way it blended personal narratives, with native-American stories, and history. The three aspects being, in reality, inseparable. In the case of Storyteller, the stories, poetry, photographs orbit around each other to create the idea of “story” as what defines us in our lives: the past, present, mythic all combine to create the culture we live in as well as the individual person who lives inside of the culture. It is a fairly subtle nuanced book. Silko does not spell it all out in the way Thomas King does in “The Truth About Stories,” a book I finished a few weeks ago. King also blends personal narrative, with myth, and history. Instead, Silko, lays out the parts of her collection in a type of collage, where the various parts generate a collective power creating a larger whole from the smaller parts.
Here are just some lines I underlined as I read:
“But sometimes what we call “memory” and what we call “imagination” are not so easily distinguished.”
“The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined these differing versions came to be.”
“We were all laughing now, and we felt good saying things like this. “Anybody can act violently—-there is nothing to it; but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words.”
“even silence was alive in his stories”
“the memory
spilling out
into the world”
“So they pause and from their distance
outside of time
They wait.”
“laugh if you want to
but as I tell the story
it will begin to happen.”
Overtime I’ve noticed
I prefer more stability
as I move through a room.
I enjoy a slow movement
across familiar territory.
Never having a dancer’s grace,
I stumble on the slightest shadow
like a drunk down a dark stair.
Although my words plod on
clumsily shod feet, and I have
little surprise in my speech,
I am content, in my way,
with my pedestrian pace
to take my leave home.
(August 12, 2025)
subtext 