Thursday, July 03, 2008
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Asilomar State Beach
This was taken in Pacific Grove at Asilomar State Beach in October 2007. It was high tide at a new moon, which is the best time to catch waves... especially in the fall and winter. I made friends with the ocean at Asilomar when I lived in Pacific Grove during high school. I used to go down there at night to find peace from the turbulence of my dysfunctional family.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
And the winds came
And the winds came.
First in whispers.
Then, in long hollow shouts
that moved much faster than sound.
And the winds came.
Buried in darkness.
Whipped out of hiding by swift currents,
twisting the tunnel’s deep secrets.
And the winds came.
Sweeping avalanches of thought
onto the heart's bare branches:
leaves tangled in a storm of invisible waves.
The earth was breathing.
Come back to life and seeking
her killers. Snaking into lonely back streets,
tasting the sleep of the homeless wishes.
The winds moved each infinitesimal atom of air,
shaping it anew.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Murder for Moroons
*
*
*
Chapter One
By the uncanny osmosis of the inbred, everyone in Lake Hill knew the minute Kiana Lilly stepped off the Trailways Bus and headed up Mink Hollow Road, pulling her over-sized suitcase behind her. Although the subject never came up, it was common knowledge that Shark Closson had died and left the family home to an illegitimate daughter he never knew. After Shark won the state lottery in 1966 and headed west with his winnings, he was never seen nor heard from again. But now the secret was out that Shark had taken over the mortgage for his poor mother not long before she came to an untimely end in that car crash in Shady. Too bad for Carrie Closson, who might otherwise have enjoyed a comfortable old age on Shark’s guilty conscience.
Shark’s younger brother Drum lived just up the road from Kiana’s new house. Drum had been raised in that house, and sidelong glances under raised eyebrows silently concurred that the house should really have gone to him. But Drum could care less. The house had fallen to ruin and looked on the outside just like the inside had always felt. Drum was a creature of extremes who lived in the past... and never looked back.
A million cricket voices wrapped the evening into a shrill blanket as Kiana fumbled around inside her purse for the key. The bag slipped out of her ands and all the contents emptied out onto the dirty front porch. Crawling around on her hands and knees, she retrieved her wallet, her address book, a useless cell phone, two packs of gum, her make-up bag, a lipstick, a pen, and pencil, and finally... between a dusty troll and a dirt-encrusted flowerpot... the key. Rising, she worked the key into a rusted lock and pried open the front door.
While the rest of the world was being swallowed up by strip malls, chain pizza parlors, multi-screen cinema complexes, and the like, the stretch of highway that ran from Route 28 through West Hurley, Woodstock, Bearsville, Shady, Lake Hill, Willow, Phoenicia, around through Boiceville and back again to Route 28 seemed caught in a time warp, and looked just as it had looked for at least fifty years. Van said this had to do with restrictive commercial zoning put into effect during the 1970s and the New York City Watershed... whatever that was. Kiana hadn’t quite got all the details. Van knew about these things, since he was a Forest Ranger.
There was only one hardware store within a ten mile radius, a small family affair on Tinker Street in Woodstock. Kiana wandered up and down the dusty, overcrowded aisles, trying not to catch the eye of the disheveled octogenarian who crouched at the front counter. He had a gray-stubbled face and tousled gray hair and wore a loose-fitting plaid flannel shirt. He looked tired way beyond his considerable years and didn't want to be bothered, she thought. No doubt he was sleeping poorly, which happened to old folks a lot. Or could be unwell, could be his heart or something.
Was part of it, she wondered (as she turned a corner and paused to study a bin full of nails) that she disliked discussing toilets with strangers? You never know what might be in people’s minds. Of course a man who worked in a hardware store, who probably owned the store and had worked there all his life, would be accustomed to discussing bathroom fixtures. Maybe she didn’t want to seem ignorant, like someone who goes to a store without knowing what they came there to buy.
Worst of all was her mood. She was exhausted from having spent half the night and all morning long cleaning up the mess in the bathroom after the toilet exploded, or whatever, in the middle of the night. She was tired and aggravated to think how much work there was to be done in that house. For every task, like painting the kitchen, there were at least fifteen other tasks, all time consuming and expensive, that had to be finished first.
And the bare fact was this. Kiana did not know the first thing about home repair. She had come there to rest and recover and finish her dissertation. She wanted to set up her desk and plug in her laptop and line up her books and papers and get herself a cup of tea and sit down to work. To some that might seem odd, but she wanted it more than anything. She longed to finish; she had to. It would be closure and healing for her.
The old man coughed sharply and Kiana ducked into a darker, dustier aisle. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Even the conversation with Van had been unbearable, and she was attracted to him. Not that she planned to do anything about it or would do anything to encourage his obvious attraction to her. As far as she was concerned, she didn’t care if she ever had sex again in her life. Celibacy seemed like a wonderful idea right then. It had a pleasant sound, as clean and clear as freshly washed linen floating on a warm summer breeze: a finality, a resolution, a truce in the battle of life, a silent celebration of solitude.
Kiana rounded a corner stacked with flowerpots in various sizes, starting down another aisle. The old man coughed again, a gargling barky kind of cough that sounded like he needed to clear his throat. Just in case he was trying to get her attention, she hid behind the carousel of books and studied the titles. The Idiot’s Guide to Home Repair, Home Repair in Three Easy Lessons, Home Repair for Moroons etc. How did this craze of selling books to the American public by calling them stupid ever get started? The Idiot’s Guide to Boycotting Books That Insult Your Intelligence. Bestseller for sure.
Snobbery notwithstanding, Kiana couldn’t help but think how easy it would be to find the name of the wax thing she needed to fix the toilet by skimming the index of Home Repair for Moroons. The book was dog-eared, with the upper right hand corner of the cover creased and drooping down. Obviously people wandered in off the street from time to time to look things up without buying the book, sand so would she. As Kiana lifted the book from its wire holder and flipped to the index, a barking cough went off beside her like a bomb.
"May I help you find something?" asked the old man.
"Oh, no. Just this book," said Kiana, breezing over to the counter. Of course she did not really want the book, but it was a way of preventing any but the most structured interaction with another human being.
This meant getting out her wallet and waiting patiently while the man shuffled back behind the counter and leaned down to do things to an antique cash register that seemed to puzzle him quite a bit. He poked here and prodded there and then leaned over and peered intently, moving his head up and down the rows of keys. Nothing resulted from this activity, so he turned to the counter and picked up the book to look it over like something that had just dropped in from outer space.
Kiana spotted his glasses, with their thick lenses and wide black frames, resting on top of a cardboard stand that held small purple spray cans of glue.
"Here are your glasses, sir," she said, holding them out.
"Eh?"
"Your glasses."
"Oh." He dropped the book and grabbed the glasses, fixing the stems behind his ears with a decisive shove. His face lit up with a crooked smile as the world came into focus.
"Did you find what you were looking for?"
"This book," she said, indicating the price.
"No, I mean the other thing you were looking for."
"Oh, just browsing," she lied.
Minutes later, Kiana found herself on Tinker Street holding a book she didn’t want but figured might come in handy just the same. She had joined the flow of mainstream America, the vast sweeping tide of the middle classes who went to school only to learn that they were idiots when it came to learning anything new.
It was the first day of summer, and Woodstock was jam-packed with tourists of every size, shape, and description. Bright, shiny SUVs flanked the curbs, with another hoard flocking the streets, and crowds jostled along the sidewalks. The truth was, aside from assorted mediocre restaurants and bohemian cafes, there was no place in Woodstock to go. There were no malls or amusement parks, no intriguing museums, none of the usual irresistible attractions that cater to the tourist trade. Roundabout, a sprinkling of small artsy shops full of useless, expensive things, was all.
The Village Green across the street was temporarily fenced off with hip-high orange wire, and a demonstration of some sort was in progress, with people waving signs. Honk if you care about something; she couldn’t really see what it was she was supposed to honk if she cared about. The air was filled with the jolly braying of cars that had driven up from the City to find there was nothing much to do except gawk and spend money or else keep on driving since, anyway, there was nowhere to park.
Idle gangs of imaginatively dressed teenagers, probably locals, drifted here or congregated there in picturesque attitudes of rebellious indifference. Kiana crossed the street and went down the alley where she had hidden the truck, now sandwiched so tightly between an SUV and a car that it took her five minutes of tense maneuvering to get it out.
After Kiana arrived back home, she dropped the book on a table in the hall and spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the outhouse in the back yard. Not ideal, but would have to do for now. Earlier, Van had tried to talk her into believing she could fix everything herself. His confidence in her was inspiring. However, Van had been a carpenter and a handyman all his life, had grown up on a farm working in the barn from dawn to dusk, tinkering with tractors and milking cows, so everything that was impossible for her seemed ridiculously easy to him. She was a city girl, not that her life had been comfortable by any means.
Darkness fell, and Kiana found that she was far too tired to deal with her primitive, ill-equipped kitchen, so she ate a banana and a bag of chips, washed them down with a can of Sprite, and went up to bed. After a while, drowsiness descended like a curtain over the pages of Samuel Beckett, and Kiana fell into a very deep dream.
She found herself in the downstairs hallway by the table where she had left Home Repair for Moroons. Everything was much as she'd left it, as far as she could tell, but it was dark. And there was a man there. Someone important who was supposed to take her somewhere in her ancient Volkswagen bug which had unaccountably made its way east. She was frantically searching for her car keys, and the man was angry with her for having lost them.
The man was a stranger who looked like an older, moodier Van; or maybe more like Drum Closson, who lived up the road. In the shadows, she could barely trace a long forehead, high cheekbones, and jaw that squared off at the chin. He wore jeans with no shirt, and opalescent moonlight polished his bare arms and chest. Holding Kiana in his gaze, he moved to the table and lifted the home repair book, revealing her key. She reached for the key and saw the book's title. Murder for Moroons.
*
*
*
*
*
Chapter One
By the uncanny osmosis of the inbred, everyone in Lake Hill knew the minute Kiana Lilly stepped off the Trailways Bus and headed up Mink Hollow Road, pulling her over-sized suitcase behind her. Although the subject never came up, it was common knowledge that Shark Closson had died and left the family home to an illegitimate daughter he never knew. After Shark won the state lottery in 1966 and headed west with his winnings, he was never seen nor heard from again. But now the secret was out that Shark had taken over the mortgage for his poor mother not long before she came to an untimely end in that car crash in Shady. Too bad for Carrie Closson, who might otherwise have enjoyed a comfortable old age on Shark’s guilty conscience.
Shark’s younger brother Drum lived just up the road from Kiana’s new house. Drum had been raised in that house, and sidelong glances under raised eyebrows silently concurred that the house should really have gone to him. But Drum could care less. The house had fallen to ruin and looked on the outside just like the inside had always felt. Drum was a creature of extremes who lived in the past... and never looked back.
A million cricket voices wrapped the evening into a shrill blanket as Kiana fumbled around inside her purse for the key. The bag slipped out of her ands and all the contents emptied out onto the dirty front porch. Crawling around on her hands and knees, she retrieved her wallet, her address book, a useless cell phone, two packs of gum, her make-up bag, a lipstick, a pen, and pencil, and finally... between a dusty troll and a dirt-encrusted flowerpot... the key. Rising, she worked the key into a rusted lock and pried open the front door.
***
While the rest of the world was being swallowed up by strip malls, chain pizza parlors, multi-screen cinema complexes, and the like, the stretch of highway that ran from Route 28 through West Hurley, Woodstock, Bearsville, Shady, Lake Hill, Willow, Phoenicia, around through Boiceville and back again to Route 28 seemed caught in a time warp, and looked just as it had looked for at least fifty years. Van said this had to do with restrictive commercial zoning put into effect during the 1970s and the New York City Watershed... whatever that was. Kiana hadn’t quite got all the details. Van knew about these things, since he was a Forest Ranger.
There was only one hardware store within a ten mile radius, a small family affair on Tinker Street in Woodstock. Kiana wandered up and down the dusty, overcrowded aisles, trying not to catch the eye of the disheveled octogenarian who crouched at the front counter. He had a gray-stubbled face and tousled gray hair and wore a loose-fitting plaid flannel shirt. He looked tired way beyond his considerable years and didn't want to be bothered, she thought. No doubt he was sleeping poorly, which happened to old folks a lot. Or could be unwell, could be his heart or something.
Was part of it, she wondered (as she turned a corner and paused to study a bin full of nails) that she disliked discussing toilets with strangers? You never know what might be in people’s minds. Of course a man who worked in a hardware store, who probably owned the store and had worked there all his life, would be accustomed to discussing bathroom fixtures. Maybe she didn’t want to seem ignorant, like someone who goes to a store without knowing what they came there to buy.
Worst of all was her mood. She was exhausted from having spent half the night and all morning long cleaning up the mess in the bathroom after the toilet exploded, or whatever, in the middle of the night. She was tired and aggravated to think how much work there was to be done in that house. For every task, like painting the kitchen, there were at least fifteen other tasks, all time consuming and expensive, that had to be finished first.
And the bare fact was this. Kiana did not know the first thing about home repair. She had come there to rest and recover and finish her dissertation. She wanted to set up her desk and plug in her laptop and line up her books and papers and get herself a cup of tea and sit down to work. To some that might seem odd, but she wanted it more than anything. She longed to finish; she had to. It would be closure and healing for her.
The old man coughed sharply and Kiana ducked into a darker, dustier aisle. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Even the conversation with Van had been unbearable, and she was attracted to him. Not that she planned to do anything about it or would do anything to encourage his obvious attraction to her. As far as she was concerned, she didn’t care if she ever had sex again in her life. Celibacy seemed like a wonderful idea right then. It had a pleasant sound, as clean and clear as freshly washed linen floating on a warm summer breeze: a finality, a resolution, a truce in the battle of life, a silent celebration of solitude.
Kiana rounded a corner stacked with flowerpots in various sizes, starting down another aisle. The old man coughed again, a gargling barky kind of cough that sounded like he needed to clear his throat. Just in case he was trying to get her attention, she hid behind the carousel of books and studied the titles. The Idiot’s Guide to Home Repair, Home Repair in Three Easy Lessons, Home Repair for Moroons etc. How did this craze of selling books to the American public by calling them stupid ever get started? The Idiot’s Guide to Boycotting Books That Insult Your Intelligence. Bestseller for sure.
Snobbery notwithstanding, Kiana couldn’t help but think how easy it would be to find the name of the wax thing she needed to fix the toilet by skimming the index of Home Repair for Moroons. The book was dog-eared, with the upper right hand corner of the cover creased and drooping down. Obviously people wandered in off the street from time to time to look things up without buying the book, sand so would she. As Kiana lifted the book from its wire holder and flipped to the index, a barking cough went off beside her like a bomb.
"May I help you find something?" asked the old man.
"Oh, no. Just this book," said Kiana, breezing over to the counter. Of course she did not really want the book, but it was a way of preventing any but the most structured interaction with another human being.
This meant getting out her wallet and waiting patiently while the man shuffled back behind the counter and leaned down to do things to an antique cash register that seemed to puzzle him quite a bit. He poked here and prodded there and then leaned over and peered intently, moving his head up and down the rows of keys. Nothing resulted from this activity, so he turned to the counter and picked up the book to look it over like something that had just dropped in from outer space.
Kiana spotted his glasses, with their thick lenses and wide black frames, resting on top of a cardboard stand that held small purple spray cans of glue.
"Here are your glasses, sir," she said, holding them out.
"Eh?"
"Your glasses."
"Oh." He dropped the book and grabbed the glasses, fixing the stems behind his ears with a decisive shove. His face lit up with a crooked smile as the world came into focus.
"Did you find what you were looking for?"
"This book," she said, indicating the price.
"No, I mean the other thing you were looking for."
"Oh, just browsing," she lied.
Minutes later, Kiana found herself on Tinker Street holding a book she didn’t want but figured might come in handy just the same. She had joined the flow of mainstream America, the vast sweeping tide of the middle classes who went to school only to learn that they were idiots when it came to learning anything new.
It was the first day of summer, and Woodstock was jam-packed with tourists of every size, shape, and description. Bright, shiny SUVs flanked the curbs, with another hoard flocking the streets, and crowds jostled along the sidewalks. The truth was, aside from assorted mediocre restaurants and bohemian cafes, there was no place in Woodstock to go. There were no malls or amusement parks, no intriguing museums, none of the usual irresistible attractions that cater to the tourist trade. Roundabout, a sprinkling of small artsy shops full of useless, expensive things, was all.
The Village Green across the street was temporarily fenced off with hip-high orange wire, and a demonstration of some sort was in progress, with people waving signs. Honk if you care about something; she couldn’t really see what it was she was supposed to honk if she cared about. The air was filled with the jolly braying of cars that had driven up from the City to find there was nothing much to do except gawk and spend money or else keep on driving since, anyway, there was nowhere to park.
Idle gangs of imaginatively dressed teenagers, probably locals, drifted here or congregated there in picturesque attitudes of rebellious indifference. Kiana crossed the street and went down the alley where she had hidden the truck, now sandwiched so tightly between an SUV and a car that it took her five minutes of tense maneuvering to get it out.
After Kiana arrived back home, she dropped the book on a table in the hall and spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the outhouse in the back yard. Not ideal, but would have to do for now. Earlier, Van had tried to talk her into believing she could fix everything herself. His confidence in her was inspiring. However, Van had been a carpenter and a handyman all his life, had grown up on a farm working in the barn from dawn to dusk, tinkering with tractors and milking cows, so everything that was impossible for her seemed ridiculously easy to him. She was a city girl, not that her life had been comfortable by any means.
Darkness fell, and Kiana found that she was far too tired to deal with her primitive, ill-equipped kitchen, so she ate a banana and a bag of chips, washed them down with a can of Sprite, and went up to bed. After a while, drowsiness descended like a curtain over the pages of Samuel Beckett, and Kiana fell into a very deep dream.
She found herself in the downstairs hallway by the table where she had left Home Repair for Moroons. Everything was much as she'd left it, as far as she could tell, but it was dark. And there was a man there. Someone important who was supposed to take her somewhere in her ancient Volkswagen bug which had unaccountably made its way east. She was frantically searching for her car keys, and the man was angry with her for having lost them.
The man was a stranger who looked like an older, moodier Van; or maybe more like Drum Closson, who lived up the road. In the shadows, she could barely trace a long forehead, high cheekbones, and jaw that squared off at the chin. He wore jeans with no shirt, and opalescent moonlight polished his bare arms and chest. Holding Kiana in his gaze, he moved to the table and lifted the home repair book, revealing her key. She reached for the key and saw the book's title. Murder for Moroons.
*
*
*
Friday, July 27, 2007
Sleeping Eyes (Poetry 1993)
shaping puzzles of truth.
He sleeps, pretenses
in shapeless heaps
on a chair beside the bed.
Outside, rain slaps,
splashing the hushed wind.
Penetrating flowers prepare
tiny, slow-motion explosions,
to prove love's unseen colors:
nameless, unknown, pale,
fragile as morning.
Rich petals unfold imperceptibly,
an invisible, vibrant kiss.
Light sets sail in an angel's
silken smile, singing
of the treasure disguised in his
sleeping eyes.
________________________________________________________
Thursday, July 19, 2007
The Secret of Numbers
(Poetry 1998)
382
A drink of water to declare bankruptcy. No
money, life itself was to blame. No one to
help. “I’m studying languages, not
mathematics,” he said. Number eighty-two
in the sixth row. She worships her own
statue: a Sunday child, who can see what
others can’t. She thought she held a child,
but there was nothing. His daughter, a girl
who loved just ordinary water, it’s color and
fragrance. Counting funeral wreaths,
counting poor people. I was a Sunday child,
and he made me his slave. Remember when
she dropped her bracelet, pulling out bricks
one by one?
181
Close with the police and, even though there
was no Sunday child at the ghost supper,
she can’t stand the sight of her own
daughter. Is the young girl sick? He’s like
the devil himself and can go through locked
doors. He can stay in the closet, which is
what wives say when they want to murder
their husbands. Your husband provoked
payment with his signet ring. All languages
are codes, but she could sense the light.
Times up! You’re a thief who steals
souls, like a vampire. She had witnessed a
crime go into that closet.
23
Adèle! Possess the virtues I lack. What’s
the point of talking vampires? Everything
she touches shrivels and dries. To lock a
window, because my hand had grown so
thin. I saw in lettering like scorpions that he
had been love with the dead man’s son. My
father ended up in a madhouse, with water
that’s stagnant. The harp was silent. Deaf
and dumb.
195.
382
A drink of water to declare bankruptcy. No
money, life itself was to blame. No one to
help. “I’m studying languages, not
mathematics,” he said. Number eighty-two
in the sixth row. She worships her own
statue: a Sunday child, who can see what
others can’t. She thought she held a child,
but there was nothing. His daughter, a girl
who loved just ordinary water, it’s color and
fragrance. Counting funeral wreaths,
counting poor people. I was a Sunday child,
and he made me his slave. Remember when
she dropped her bracelet, pulling out bricks
one by one?
181
Close with the police and, even though there
was no Sunday child at the ghost supper,
she can’t stand the sight of her own
daughter. Is the young girl sick? He’s like
the devil himself and can go through locked
doors. He can stay in the closet, which is
what wives say when they want to murder
their husbands. Your husband provoked
payment with his signet ring. All languages
are codes, but she could sense the light.
Times up! You’re a thief who steals
souls, like a vampire. She had witnessed a
crime go into that closet.
23
Adèle! Possess the virtues I lack. What’s
the point of talking vampires? Everything
she touches shrivels and dries. To lock a
window, because my hand had grown so
thin. I saw in lettering like scorpions that he
had been love with the dead man’s son. My
father ended up in a madhouse, with water
that’s stagnant. The harp was silent. Deaf
and dumb.
195.
A montage of quotes from
August Strindberg's play
The Ghost Sonata
August Strindberg's play
The Ghost Sonata
Strindberg, Five Plays
Translated by Harry G. Carlson
________________________________________________________
Translated by Harry G. Carlson
________________________________________________________
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