A Tribute

Hemingway the Grocer

See him now
sorting the produce,
shifting it, feeling it--
not for him the rose-dappled
blood orange,
nor the bibb lettuce with
a tendency to red
at the edge of the leaf.
No broccoflower or pluots or
apples that taste like grapes.

No, only the hardest,
roundest, most perfectly
formed, and truest
lined up one after another
on the big black bench--
the pile of discards
far outweighing
what remains.

A Sketch Sentence

Four gleaming discs of gold, the torn image of the sun and the water-slicked hair of 3 tow-headed boys who churned and kicked the cool cupped water of this last late-summer swimming hole--a deep still pool formed by the churning of the water in an elbow of the thin crick that ran through the Southern Ohio hills--the summer stillness shattered by the splashing, screaming, and sheer joy of three good friends with nothing between them but water and bright sunlight dappled with the shade of branches that overstretched the crick.

Before and After III

Before:

Fox Ascending

The other day
I saw a fractal
oval white cloud
nailed to the bleached
blue sky like a day-
old fox corpse clinging
to a farmer's fence.

[c. oct 2008]

And after:

Fox Ascending

A fractal oval white
cloud nailed to bleached blue sky
like a day-old fox corpse
strung on a farmer's fence.

Before and After II

Before:

What You See When You Close Your Eyes

Depends upon the day.
__Sometimes it is the darkness of eyelids
__Sometimes it is the orange brightness
____of eyelids, or the red-heat glow
____of tired eyes.
But sometimes
it is the cobalt-verdigris sea, shifting
as you look.
___________Or the span of space
in the broken road crashing out
into the deep-blue air, deafening
in the difference.
________________Or the chain
of clouds that is the sky's
reflection of the crescent
curve of the tropical chain.
[cayo hueso?]

After:

What You See When You Close Your Eyes

Depends upon the day--
darkness of eyelids
orange brightness
red-heat glow of tired eyes

the cobalt-verdegris sea, shifting

the span of space
in the broken road
crashing out into
the deep-blue air

or a chain
of clouds--
the sky's
reflection of the crescent
curve of the tropical chain.

Before and After

Before:

[untitled]
The perpetually shifting balance
of the egret prowling the hedge-tops
in search of food. What wonders
would be seen if we could see
all at once, but vision is itself
a limit, and we cannot see
all-at-once, often not even
little-by-little.

After:

Equilibrium

Shifting balance
in the hedgetops--
egret grazing.

A Place for My Writing

In the new world of writing and literature, this is where I stake my claim.