I accompanied a horse-shoeing friend on her rounds one day in the rolling hills around Liberty, Mo. All the snow and mud and old barns and so on gave me the heebie-jeebies – farms for some reason bring up acute claustrophobia in me – but the biggest annoyance was being…
Two-year-old Virginia is missing Her parents look throughout the tidy Wooden house Where yellow curtains glow They go outside and peer In the shady woods Where a brook chuckles a sudden secret And small shy forest mammals Are gone to earth…
After much valiant and serious facing of the big bad world of publishing, as pertains to my book-which-is-trying-out-its-big-strong-wings-but-is-yet-new, events evolved into such a place that it was relevant and indeed correct for me to cease my struggles, scrounging, and bullet-biting for a little while. I could hardly believe it…freedom, after…
The Swiss chalet where I was staying has a beautiful kitchen, but I didn’t want to lay in a lot of supplies, as I was just there for a few weeks before taking off to Holland. Too, shopping involved dragging a rolling caddy up very steep hills – an opportunity…
In a Purple Greeting Card for Nisarg Which has on it a painting of a full moon blobbily luminous behind the branches of the huge tree which borders the courtyard of the pyramids in the commune in Poona (What is life but a pyramid Near which is a…
My father loved fireworks. My brothers tell me that before I came along, he would, each Fourth of July, take a babies’ bathtub out on the crabgrassy front lawn and fill it with water from the hose. Then he’d put into it a thing from his lab: sodium metal, a…
Mom (age 91) recited this while we sat in the HomeTown Buffet in Eugene, Oregon with our piled plates in front of us: Little Miss Muffet Went to HomeTown Buffet And was eating her dinner one day Along came a spider And sat down beside her…
I kneel behind him Pick up my hair, half per hand And wrap it around His worked-out, pork-fed middle And there’s hair left over still to bend We pull the light in from the music Even in Kansas I wander with my wrinkled-fairy body…
Once in the early 90’s in India I was very ill with mercury poisoning. A reckless dentist had assured me no dental dam was needed as, with a hot drill, he removed eleven amalgam fillings (I could feel the little shards of metal in my mouth) over a space of…
One evening two thousand of us sat with folded legs on cushions in a vast oval hall with a marble floor and walls of mosquito netting. High overhead arched a roof made of tough fabric supported by metal beams. The tropic darkness clung closely to the structure, but we sat…
Ok, this is a big fat rant, about two things almost impossible to find in this consuming-mad, insectoidally-voracious, provide-anything-whatsoever-and-somebody-will-buy-it world. I’ll start with the bread, ha ha, and work up to the bras, though it just sounded better to put the latter first in the title. Ha ha. (I’m full…