Category Archives: Odds and Ends

  36 I see how strong a fragile thing can be. Look! A butterfly comes fluttering over its own reflection hovering out in the middle of a pond so deep and close you’d think no insect strength could last the … Continue reading →

… Fluttering robins louder than my singingare violent on the lawn where they’re fightingover a worm—No!—I’m wrong. As quietas a junkie gets sticking the needle in no matter what funny business preceded it—Like a junkie suddenlysilent one bird enters the … Continue reading →

… I became aware of Marc Chagall when I was a teenager in the 1960’s. Many of the artists I discovered then were still alive like Dali, Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall too, whose brides, goats, and … Continue reading →

When Robert Johnson recorded “Walking Blues” in 1936, he was working from a version Son House, not the Devil, had taught him. And the great Son House himself was borrowing from a Blues tradition that began after the Civil War … Continue reading →

    158   Like the dried up dead wasp with its venom gone rolled up on the windowsill like a ball of dust my mother slumbers with her head bent near a bowl of fruit Pat Maples sent listening … Continue reading →

On Monday night, November 1, I went to KGB to hear some poetry. Jonathan Wells was the featured reader. I didn’t know his work (there is a lot I don’t know) so when he got to the microphone, I was … Continue reading →

  T.S. Eliot joined the Anglican Church in 1927, a man of no faith who wanted to find some. Perhaps the faith was already there, the faith, at least, that if he put a pencil to paper, he would create … Continue reading →