Biophilia
Love of Nature 1 In my wife’s garden darkening at dusk bats flit soundlessly above azaleas and forsythias. While in the shadows below in the final moments of twilight paper-thin pink morning glories glow. 2 I don’t know what plants are growing in the shade down beneath the bird feeder but they’re growing so I haven’t the heart to clip them or pluck them out or cover them up with peat moss or mulch. 3 Sitting out on the back deck watching the sky with all its blue tumbling down through the branches and leaves of the trees reaching all the way to the ground. 4 In the middle of the...
Read MoreAt McDonald’s
An attractive employee with mussed hair pacing outside smoking a cigarette two construction workers discussing in simple Beckettesque lines the difficult old lady impossible to please with either woodworking or painting the family pulling up with the camping trailer ordering the biggest breakfasts they can get the father with two identical copies of himself all with crew cuts and turned up noses trailing along behind oh McDonald’s microcosm! I look at my reflection in your window wondering when it was I got to be so old and stupid...
Read MoreFish Feeding Dream
In this damn recurring dream I have a fish tank an elaborate fish tank (I don’t really, in real life have any fish tanks, when I was a child I did, with guppies and goldfish, black mollies and catfish, but that was another time, another era) a big tank, 50, 80 gallons, maybe bigger, with plants and colored rocks, ceramic bubblers and some large beautiful fish, serene fish, floating along in the water, angelfish and zebras, neon tetras and sucker-mouths stuck to the sides. But in this dream I keep forgetting to feed them, I don’t remember feeding them for weeks, yet miraculously they are...
Read More“Where are you going? Michael. Michael.”
In the car on the way home after dropping Linda off at the Ferry, my wife begins to complain about me again, one of those harpies eating the liver out of my chest, telling me that I talk about her all the time, even the children said I talk about her too much, and I relate everything to her and she’s sick of it, and she explains that at Mystic Seaport she took my camera away because I was taking too many pictures of her. “I feel like you’re burying me,” she says, “It’s like I’m already dead.” Such a terrible thing to say to me. I...
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