The Broken Cross
(part one of a series) 1 The stone cross lay like a fallen monument on the lawn of Lorrence, New Jersey ’s Holy Trinity Church, the Episcopal parish of my boyhood. For my friends and me, the cross was our pebbled platform — so many pebbles that we wondered how many were sealed together in this ten-foot crucifix barrier between the lawn and walkway to the church’s traditional red door. “I’m thinkin’ twenty thou,” said my friend Joey Wicklund one spring Sunday as we stood on the cross’s two-foot wide base before 9:30...
Read MoreThe French Teacher
“You must not forget the accent aigu!” instructed Bertrand. “Je vois que vous le faites habituellement.” He was wearing his usual tormented expression. Had anyone ever told him about it? And what was it that seemed to worry him so? “Je suis désolée,” Julianne said. “I will try to remember.” She was paying for these French lessons with her parents’ Christmas present, which every year consisted of the same sized check, and for which, considering the rise in food and gasoline prices, she was grateful. In August,...
Read MoreKissing Peter Tork
Every once in a while, I still look at people on the street and subtract forty years, trying to unearth that summer when I was twelve; a summer that goes dormant for a time, but never disappears. Sometimes I shake my head, needing to decide whether the memory is real or a figment of my imagination; but always her face comes into focus, and I know the image is true. It was at one of those rundown rustic affairs in the Poconos that they make summer camp movies about. Once a week, every Saturday except parents’ weekend, the girls’ camp from across the lake would come to...
Read MoreThe Monkey Chronicles
We took a stroll by the water, and Mabel was clinging to my arm. I was younger then. I was living in an elevator on Tomilson Street in the Bay District. All day, when I wasn’t sightseeing with Mabel, I went up and down that elevator… though never past the seventh floor. It is possible I was waiting for the Muse, but it is also possible that the Muse had disguised itself once again as a monkey. I didn’t care for monkeys then, or now, but at least there weren’t that many of them by the bay. That was the year Mabel was practicing witchcraft on the...
Read MoreFinding Giverny Off A Sand Road In Rural FL
Monet painted our pond: wind slurring the water, lily pads blurred with white lights against green swirls, the eye of a cataract sky awash with Van Gogh’s iris. Heat Wave Contents
Read MoreLate Night with a Seasoned Poet
after reading Mary Oliver I cannot reach you at five a.m. when you spring awake to watch a summer rose fall into a pink-petaled lake where fishes bloom. I’m not a morning person unless a winter less night yawns & stretches into dawn with jarring songs of owls & whippoorwills and the charming squeak of a bat. Outlined at dusk, its soaring silhouette intersects the evening sky, circling insects and other small...
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