I don’t write in a journal everyday, but I have accumulated many entries over the past 50+ years beginning in 1966. Some items evolved into longer works. Among the leftovers little pieces survived. I thought a collection of these with a piece culled from the same date in a past year would make an interesting yearbook. The consistencies and inconsistencies of mind, skipping back and forth across time, provide varied perspectives. It is difficult to remember the context of the past we’ve lived; we also make suppositions about times that predate ourselves.

The few alterations from original drafts were to improve clarity. The worst of my work is not included. There remains enough mediocrity and immaturity to make me feel humble and you feel smart. There are also moments of accidental insight and incidental humor.

Author Stephen Crane referred to his little pieces as pills…apparently they were small and somewhat hard to swallow, but good for you.


Comments Welcome!

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Never Again


August 4, 2001  (I was 56)

                  Never Again
Upon hearing that Senator Tom Daschle’s father
lost a lifetime of his paintings in a fire.

Never again.
The force that loaded hues from the palette
then carried the brush across the vision to the canvas
was gone.
The rightness of the stroke
applied in unconscious confidence
to make the unseen visible,
lost in a moment’s speculative hesitation.
The fire consumed the house.
The first thought after the panic,
“Everyone’s alive,”
was not quite true.
A hundred creations that counted the years
of gifts of self to the self
were reduced to funereal ash.
“Only things,” the brave perspective
offered to others measuring their losses.
But hesitation grew from speculation
of impermanence to indifference
for gifts to the self of the self.
The fire consumed the house.
Never again color brushed against vision;
everyone alive, only things.

No comments:

Post a Comment