How we are, where we are — There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. …

My colleague, Jean-Jacques, had ideas of reform. He tempted me — we went to have a coffee at a restaurant in Tours, one of those delightful little restaurants of France, where you sit outdoors, in open view of any chance, and free to openly decry the failings of the…

It ends well. But it starts long ago. — When I was a little girl I knew I was a little girl. But that’s like saying I knew the sky is orange. No one knows the sky is orange, because the sky is by definition blue — except in places like Chicago along the lakefront at night, but that’s…

a whimsical sonnet

Saffron is a precious substance, but easy to obtain. Buy some crocus bulbs. Plant them. Watch them grow. Harvest the saffron. Now your menu is replete with exotic esculents. But the cost of harvest — how severe it is! Its cost is measured in tedium: For you must comb…

In the Faroe Islands  a farmer may commonly die  while minding sheep.

A poem of listening — I get so tired, listening to the voices, the words, so many times — Maybe if you were not quite so weird, quite so queer — and so many times we explain, and so many times are unheard. But I hear I am exhausted, and my sisters and brothers are so very tired. Maybe if we went into hiding, like we did when the world was more sensible, when girls were girls and men were men. . .

A study on Abel Carlevaro’s Microestudio 6 Each of your efforts, each symptom, each bit of yours written more wittily, wakes in me yearnings, wakes meaning, makes every bit richly felt, even when all I feel, I miss, are feelings of holding you, scolding you, molding you. . . Holding me, folding me. . . What we touch, did touch, what wasted. . . What calls, beckons? — quickens? A beacon. What calls? Humor, hoping, recalling. What calls? Calming, shaping, distilling. What hurts? Losing, giving, releasing. What hopes? Leaving, giving, receiving your love. I am always with you. Always you are with me. Enough for today.

I met a cicada the other day. It was sitting on the wall of my garage. Cicadas aren’t seen in my neighborhood — It is not the sort of weather for them here. I looked in its eyes, and was taken back To forgotten bits of memory: of heat, Of the warm evenings of childhood in the east, Of days in the shade, and the sweat of night, And cicada skins all clinging to the trees. But back in myself, in my cold northwest, Inscrutable eyes looking back at me, I was glad to be away, to have escaped.