Partners & Pardners
SamplerIn the pre-op room, my wife was given
a scalene block for a brief procedure.
She had shoulder surgery three months back,
and now again they’ll anesthetize her
to break up scars that have kept her in pain.
She’ll be comatose, however…
2019
SamplerSome are apt to swoon over nature,
loving what they call harmony.
But Tennyson got it right on whoever
Trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law,
saying Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed.
The…
My Tribe & I
SamplerIn a characteristically compelling essay called “Grub: A Man in the Market,”1 Garret Keizer briefly muses on his distaste for upper New England farmers’ markets. He concedes that those institutions appeal to what his wife Kathy calls “our…
Irruption
SamplerAt dawn today, the fog still slept on the river.
The sun of a seemingly endless, Hadean heat wave
had not yet broken through, so I drove to the launch
for a paddle. Green herons, smart as sentries, patrolled
one bank. A beaver sculled beside…
What Smart People Think
SamplerTo begin with, let me quote a bit from something written for George Jones in the 1990s by Nashville veterans Randy Boudreaux, Sam Hogin, and Kim Williams:
I started drinking and actin' crazy
Way back in sixty five
Mama would pray and say,…
Reckoning
SamplerLet us not take it for granted that
life exists more fully in what is
commonly thought big than in
what is commonly thought small.
-Virginia Woolf, "The Common Reader"
Once, on the steps of a cabin in wild Montana,
just before dawn I…