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.


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Sunday, July 7, 2019

The rose I stole from the grave of Thoreau


July 7, 2006  (I was 61) 

The rose I stole from the grave of Thoreau
nine years ago this week
still resides in Walden page ninety-seven
pressed against this fore-noted epitaph:
“Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?
“Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”

Knowing the rose and inscription are there
brings me occasionally back to the volume
and back to the deed at the Concord gravesite
on the 180th commemoration of his birth.
Members of his official Society placed the flowers
which I later co-incidentally arrived to find.
Without a tribute to offer, I took one to preserve.
With the same rash purpose I opened a random page
that brought me to the quotation.

Thumbing I find assigned sophomore pages marked
in Economy and Civil Disobedience
I hang around with Brute Neighbors,
peruse the poems of smoke and mist
and search in vain for a voice
with which I might bring life to Inspiration.
To my nose
I hold the rose that reached back from his grave
and I fold it back into its page.

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