Category Archives: Uncategorized

I take the Waste Land as a day-to-day thing.  When a dismal, cold slate gray rain falls from a slate gray sky, when it looks like wartime London, need we say more — T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem, celebrating its centennial, … Continue reading →

Back in the day when I was a kid, it seemed cool to be an old soul.  Whoever first enlightened me, when I first heard the phrase (to be or to have?), I don’t recall.  Being an old soul seemed … Continue reading →

Classical music concert by the sea.  Sun hot on our arms, yet the air makes us shiver.  Little cabin, doors thrown open.  Unaccustomed voices — women and black composers.  Accustomed voices: Dvorak. Simultaneity: Crickets. These are not usual times.  It … Continue reading →

Summer can be poetry without the words.  A sweet peach cuts through time and puts you right in the everlasting camp of the gods.  A tomato is a love apple, pomme d’amour.  The spume of the sea drenches with spent … Continue reading →

As a traveler, I understand;you, a traveler, too, must travel, we mustsay good-bye,but a drop of radiance,a grapeof imaginary sun,has touched the blind blood of everyday… ——  Pablo Neruda, excerpt from “Ode to the Third Day” Neruda, were you writing about a day of … Continue reading →

“There is another world but it is in this one,” said Paul Eluard.  This one, here, celui-ci in the heavy glittering mid-August summer.  Sometimes the tree has one cicada that shatters the insistent sun.  Sometimes the chêne has one cicada … Continue reading →

In March 2020, obsessed with the platanes, or plane trees that lend magic to the roads in southern France, I organized a series of poems and pictures about their disappeance.  Covid derailed the presentation of the piece— the series languished. … Continue reading →

Sunday on the cusp of August in the countryside should be long, should feel endless.  At midi, noon in France, a stillness sets in that is both awesome, in the classical sense of the sun’s strict justice, and dauntingly hot.  … Continue reading →