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Welcome

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Make yourself at home. Put your feet up. Grab your favorite beverage and prepare to enjoy the reads.
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Sunday

PEACE and POSSIBILITIES

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May today there be peace within. 
 
May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be.

May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. 
 
May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. 
 
May you be content with yourself just the way you are.

Let this knowledge settle into your bones.

Allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. 
 
It is there for each and every one of us.

 
 
Note: Photo is of Santa Cruz, California Wharf 

Wednesday

MY PROTECTOR

MY PROTECTOR
(1968)

Dr. Mindell, tall, slender, well-composed, did not behave like a normal orthopedic Surgeon.  The one’s I had met before were all too high and mighty to be human, to look you in the eyes as if you were an equal.  They were accustomed to everyone idolizing them and took it for granted they were Gods.  I did notice that when he made rounds, he carried a little bit of that remote untouchable aura, probably for the sake of his entourage, but when he arrived in my room, he did not stand at the farthest corner nor at the foot of my bed like other physicians.  he came right up beside me and leaned against the mattress as he taught his students about the rare condition being treated.  Rare condition or not, in the presence of Dr. Mindell, I still felt like a human being, instead of a “case”.

Even though’ he hacked away  a large part of my body over several years of surgery to save my life, I don’t necessarily think of him as my protector for the reason of his medical expertise. Just one incident clings to my memory making me grateful for his existence.

After many weeks languishing in the hospital bed, I became well enough to be placed in a wheel-chair instead of a gurney to be transported to other departments for tests or treatments. One day, after a long wait in the radiology dept.  a staff-person wheeled me in for a set of x-rays.  And when all the required pictures had been taken, I was wheeled back and parted in the long empty hallway.

 “Aren’t you taking me back to my room?” I asked.

  “No.” I was told, “Someone else will take you up shortly.”

I sat there in the cold corridor until my butt became numb and the pain in my legs screamed for release.  At which point, I unlatched the lock on the wheels and began to impel myself toward the main hallway.  My arms were weak from having been abed for so long.  The chair, at least a hundred years old, was made of wood, with a very high backrest and huge wheels.  It was very unwieldy to operate, but, struggling mightily, my determination drove me further and further away from Radiology.  It surprised me that no paid any attention to me.  Dressed only in a short backless gown with hair splayed about my head, it was obvious I was a patient making her way alone in the busy hallways.  Visitors passed me by giving wide berth.  Hospital personnel bustled by sometimes blindly brushed up against me
as they passed.

I grew resentful.  Not only had I been forgotten, left to rot in the drafty bowels of the Hospital basement, but I was for all purposes, invisible to the very people employed to watch after my health.  What if something should happen to me?  I would be ignored.  Fearful of my invisibility, I strained harder to reach my goal;  the huge main elevator that could take me up the many floors to my room. By the time I arrived, I was weak, cold and perspiring profusely.  The hospital, as ancient as my wheelchair had an old-fashioned elevator.  Every time I had been taken to it by a staffperson, they had hurriedly forced the wheelchair through the open doors racing against time to get me inside, before the doors clenched shut.

There were no safety features as there are today, no magic eye to bounce the elevator door back open should someone or something attempt to pass through while it closed.  So, when the doors opened, people traipsed in as I struggled to wheel my cumbersome chair through.  Needless to say, the doors clamped shut on me just as I pulled my arms out of the way.  I looked at the people inside, who would not meet my eyes. It didn’t occur to me that this was serious, until the floor raised up beneath me and the wheelchair tilted precariously.

Not able to move my lower body in any way to save myself, I sat there helpless, as the chair began to crunch.  The only view I had at this point was the ceiling.  My last thought was, “after being heroically saved from the bone cancer and surviving, I am going to go by way of an elevator! Oh, well!” There was nothing I could do. I just resigned myself to my fate as I awaited my demise.

Just then, Dr. Mindell scooped me up in his big arms and carried me down the hall and placed me on the nearest gurney and personally returned me to my room. I don’t know what happened to the wheelchair or the people in the elevator. At the time I was too tired and sick to even care.  I was just glad that my protector, my body guard was there to save me.

Monday

Old Memory Stays Fresh

Today is a day in my history I cannot forget.

It sticks in my mind like clay at the bottom of a potter's wheel. You might laugh that this is such an "important" day when you learn the situation. But, it is just one of those things that when the day comes up, I automatically realize.... "Oh, it was this date that happened."

My hair all blonde, teased and sprayed in Marilyn Monroe style, I walked with my new date, Jeff, recently returned from Viet Nam, when my new pair of high heels caught on a rise of the sidewalk where a tree root had lifted it.

No big deal for the average person, but this fall caused me to do a split in the worse way possible. I had only been out of the hospital a few days after my Internal Hemipelvectomy surgery and the three months it had taken for me to recovery and heal sufficiently that I could actually walk again and go home. All I wanted to do was start my life all over again, and leave those haunting cancer memories behind me.

My mind set the incident in slow-motion re-play. I felt the heel of my shoe catch on the sidewalk, saw my body going down, tried to catch myself as my legs, betraying me, slid out in opposite directions. Then, the split of the incision pulled apart deep within me, and the hot blood seeped into the area where bone cancer used to be. It had not happened in a slow motion dream but in a blink of the eye, and there I was sprawled on the sidewalk.

Jeff had been a Medic in Nam, his flight or fight reaction were instinctual. When I fell, an odd look came across his face, something empty and desperate. His automatic response was to get me up, and hurry me off somewhere. Anywhere, to take me away from .... what? Enemy fire?

While writhing on the sidewalk, I had to convince him we were not on the battlefield, certainly not with my high heels. I told him there was no place to take me, no place safer than where I was. I had remain calm as I instructed him to go into the nearest restaurant and ask them to call for an ambulance. Because of my cancer history and the familiar physical symptoms I was experiencing, I knew I would not be able to get up and walk any time soon on my own.

I never saw Jeff again. He didn't follow the ambulance to the hospital. Perhaps he was as traumatized as I was?

Long story.....short. I spent another two months in the hospital.

So, today I look at this forty year stretch and pause. Many other things have occurred in my life with even more intensity. Today I no longer dream of falling and tearing myself open. Today I can smile about it. Maybe it's the ludicrous-ness of it all; blonde bombshell, soldier boy, romantic walk to restaurant; it was something out of a movie, and then, the twist...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Note:
Jeff, if you are reading this, I understand and I hope you got good treatment for your PSTD. Sending you love and healing.

Saturday

Grandma's Cookbook

 
 
 
 
We may live without poetry, music and art;

We may live without conscience, and live with out heart.

We may live without friends, we may live without books;

But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

- Owen Meredith
 
 
 
Three Meals a Day
By Maude C. Cooke
Published     1902
by The Educational Co.


Monday

Free Brain Book

A Primer on the Brain and Nervous System

Brain Facts 
cover image
Brain Facts is a 74-page primer on the brain and nervous system, published by Society for Neuroscience.

Designed for a lay audience as an introduction to neuroscience, Brain Facts is also a valuable educational resource used by high school teachers and students who participate in Brain Awareness Week.

The 2008 edition updates all sections and includes new information on brain development, learning and memory, language, neurological and psychiatric illnesses, potential therapies, and more.

Download the full book (PDF) or download individual sections below. All downloads are PDFs.

~~~~~~~~
Note: reposted from http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=brainfacts

Saturday

Cinnamon Toast


My brother had played an April's Fool's trick on me. I was so little then that I didn't think it was funny and my feelings were hurt.

Mommy comforted me and explained how funny it could be to play an April Fool's trick on Davy.

She sat me down at the table and poured milk into my cereal. As I reached for the sugar, she pointed out how much the sugar looked just like the salt. I didn't need another hint. I asked Mommy if I could substitute one for the other to play an April Fool's trick on Davy.


I stood on the chair pouring the sugar into a bowl, then emptied the contents of the salt shaker into the sugar jar. I looked through the glass closely to make sure it didn't look like salt before I could convince myself that my April Fool's trick would work. I then attempted to pour the sugar into the salt shaker with little luck. Most of it splayed out on the table and onto the floor.

Mommy was not one to rush in and do the job for me. No, she stood by patiently and gave me a the broom to sweep the sugar from the floor. I didn't do a very good job of it to be sure. But, later that day the floor was miraculously clean of any evidence of the spill.

Since I was not capable of handling a five pound bag of sugar myself, Mommy got it down from the cupboard and put some into a glass measuring cup so I could more carefully pour the sugar into the salt shaker.

Once my plan was completed I awaited anxiously for the moment my big brother would come into the kitchen to have his breakfast.

Imagine my dismay when he asked if he could have eggs and sausage.

With a wink and a smile Mommy tried to help me out by suggesting Davy have cereal instead. But, we were out his favorite kind and he turned it down. He was not about to eat any of his little sister's cereal. I hadn't thought of that! So, I sat at the table pouting while Mommy cooked his breakfast.

Davy went to the toaster to put in the bread. In those days toast did not pop up by itself, the toaster had little doors that had to b opened when your toast was ready.

We had to stand there keeping an eye on it otherwise our toast would burn. I loved looking through the intricately formed slits in the little doors of the toaster observing the bright orange curly cues inside heat up.

As I stood next to him, he turned to me and asked if I would like some toast. I certainly did.

While Davy buttered his toast, he kept an eye out to keep my toast from burning. I was not allowed to touch the toaster as I would burn myself on it's hot metal doors.

Even if I could, I would not have been fast enough to get the toast out before it burned. I hated blackened toast. Scraping it never removed that charcoal flavor out if it!


Buttering my toast for me, Davy turned and said, "You want some cinnamon sugar on your toast?"

I loved cinnamon sugar and nodded enthusiastically. It didn't occur to me that the little crystal bowl my mother kept the mixture in was empty. When Davy reached for the sugar and mixed it with the cinnamon to put into the little crystal bowl I didn't give it a second thought.

Just as Mommy turned from the stove to give Davy his plate of eggs and sausage, and before she could say a word, I took my first bite of my cinnamon salty toast!

~~~~~~~~~~~
Photos are not my own

Friday

Which Way to Go?


You can't change the wind, but you can set your sails in the direction you want.

Favorite quote of James Durbin
American Idol Contestant
from Santa Cruz, California



Note: Sail boat photo was taken in Santa Cruz.


Wednesday

Just in Case You Missed the Opportunity to Help

It was not just one earthquake, and one tsunami that has done the unimaginable. The March 11 magnitude-8.9 quake (later changed to 9.0) was followed for hours by more than 50+ aftershocks, nearly 40 of them more than magnitude 6.0

Your donations are most welcome and appreciated.

Reputable organizations providing appropriate relief for Japan:

Relief orgs:

• Cruz Roja Española

• Canpan Fields (a Japanese nonprofit organization)

• Save the Children

• Non-Believers Giving Aid

• NGO Jen

• International Medical Corps

• Association of Medical Doctors in Asia

• Canadian Red Cross

• American Red Cross

• Doctors without Borders

• The Salvation Army

• Oxfam

• Global Living

• Care

• ShelterBox

Someone I love has family and friends in Japan.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo taken by Katsumi

Tuesday

Dreams




Deep into that darkness peering,
long I stood there,
wondering, fearing, doubting,
dreaming dreams
no mortal ever dared to dream before.
~ Edgar Allan Poe







~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo Art by Elizabeth Munroz

Sunday

Rowdy and Ruckus 1968

With the dust roiling up in the air, my sister and I shoveled our piles of junk into the middle of the floor. It wasn’t long before we needed to throw open the windows and doors so we could breathe. We were hanging around the house at Ft. Niagara Beach, by ourselves,  under strict instructions to get that room cleaned up once and for all, or else! Or else, what? Probably nothing, really. But we knew we needed to get the job done. It would have been a drudge, had anyone stayed home with us to look over our shoulder, but thankfully, we had been deserted by the rest of the family.     

WKBW, our favorite radio station blared on full volume. We had to shout over it to hear one another.  As Aretha Franklin belted out,  R- E- S- P- E- C- T!  FIND OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO ME!“, we accompanied her at the top of our lungs.  There was something a little evil in our glee, knowing we must be bugging the heck out of our neighbors, especially Mrs. Steffan. We knew she was reporting my every movement to my ex-in-laws, and took special delight in giving her ammunition. They all seemed to think it would go in their favor for removing my kids from me. 

Once the radio began replaying the re-plays of the re-plays as they did on Saturdays, we turned it off and kept on singing as we picked up the clothes off the bedroom floor and separated the dirty ones from the clean. Then we carefully refolded the one’s Mom had just piled on our beds a few days before. Funny how everything had landed on the floor, with everything else. Well, we couldn’t help it. We were teenage girls. Or, rather, my sister was the teenage girl. I was the newly divorced mother of two, who wished she were a teenager again. Being with my sister automatically made me recapture being a teenager. She was full of energy and enthusiasm that I had thought deserted me, until I was around her.

We got a good rendition of “Amen” going traipsing around the house, clapping our hands, and swinging our bodies as though we were in a hot revival meeting. (I had never been to one before, but now, I know that is how we were acting).

Sorting out all the papers and trash was the easiest part. Anything that looked like schoolwork got trashed by wadding it up and giving a quick overhand heave-ho into the wastebasket. It didn’t take long to have it overflowing. Using the same method for sorting the dirty clothes we giggled and laughed maniacally. We both would have been great on a girl’s basketball team!

In the midst of our enthusiasm, we got carried away by the Four Tops, as we hauled the dirty clothes into the laundry room to wash. Energized, and no longer isolated to our room,  we decided to surprise Mom and clean up the whole house. So, we began cleaning the kitchen and bathroom. Then, singing louder over the vacuum with Diana Ross and the Supremes, we cleaned and straightened up the living room. Our voices getting hoarse, we changed to the Polish station that Mom’s friend, always Annie listened to. The rollicking polka music of the OOM-PAH-PAHed  as we grabbed each other and polkaed around the house until we grew dizzy, and tripped over furniture. We landed on the floor, laughing gleefully aware of how rowdy we were being and how it must be really annoying the hell out of old Mrs. Steffan next door.

What would she put into her spy report this week?

~~~~~~~~~~

Note: The first picture is of my sister. The second one is of me.

Thursday

Verna's Lines

Spring cleaning has taken over my life. While going through old file boxes, I came across the following written to me by Verna, which I find as touching today as when I first read it.

When someone believes in you
It is easier
to believe in yourself.

To know that someone
will remember your star,
when everyone else has forgotten
it was ever shining at all,
keeps you looking to the sky.

It is good and strong
to be happy for yourself
and all that you do.

It's just that when someone like you
has faith in someone like me,
the happiness is easier to find.

Look to the light for it never burns out.

1990 B.J. Verna

Tuesday

Free Yale Education

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. You can take these free classes online from the comfort of your home. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.
When you click on the link, a random class is featured.  If you look at the column on the left you will see a list of subjects in which the free classes are available. 

For example: When I click on English there are four classes being offered. At the moment, I am most interested in Modern Poetry taught by Professor Langdon Hammer. So when I click on the class title, the class description page is revealed. This also includes a bio of Professor Hammer. At the bottom of the description paragraph, it says: view class sessions
Be sure to check the column on the left of this page, too. There is a way to download the complete class in Zip file if you do not want to do it one by one.
I learned about this from a very talented young writer, Nath Jones. Thank you, Nath!

Saturday

The World Inside




WRITING AND KNOWING

8th Annual Poetry Workshop with
Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, and Joseph Millar

July 24-29, 2011
at Esalen, Big Sur, CA


Esalen housing sometimes fills up fast, especially the less expensive rooms, so register soon. Online registration is open now at esalen.org


Scroll down to the bottom for poems by Dorianne, Joe and Ellen

There is a world inside each of us that we know better than anything else, and a world outside of us that calls for our attention. Our subject matter is always right with us. The trick is to find out what we know, challenge what we know, own what we know, and then give it away in language.

We will write poems, share our writing, and hear what our work touches in others. We'll also read model poems by contemporary poets and discuss aspects of the craft. But mainly this will be a writing retreat-- time to explore and create in a supportive community. Though the focus is on poetry, prose writers who want to enrich their language will find it a fertile environment.

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy…that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist… It is not your business to determine how good it is…It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.   --Martha Graham

The focus of this workshop is on generating new poems. Dorianne, Joe and Ellen will each give a talk on craft to help us extend our skills. 

Dorianne Laux will talk on: The Spare Poem
After I've put everything in, what should I take out?  Big question.  HUGE.  We’ll look at a few poems by established poets such as James Wright, Jack Gilbert, Malena Morling, Jane Kenyon and Mark Doty to see what they might have left on the cutting room floor, how setting, implication and image can help us say it without saying it, how less can be more.
Joe Millar will talk on: The Fork In the Road

This year Joe will talk about various places where the poem in progress can change direction or mood and the delight that can arise from such turns and surprises.  We'll look at a few poems which shift and change their way down the page and consider some strategies for incorporating these techniques of mutability into our own writing.

Ellen Bass will talk on: Embodiment
The body is a great resource in poetry. By paying attention to the body and using physical detail, we can move our poems along the continuum from telling to showing, from abstract to concrete, from reporting to enacting. You don’t want your reader to say, “Oh, this poet feels really strongly about this.” You want readers to actually have the experience of that strong feeling themselves. We’ll look at poems which achieve this visceral impact, study how they do it, and practice some of those gestures ourselves.

Please join us if:

*You've hit a plateau in your writing and want to break through to the next level.

*You're just beginning and want to get started with supportive teachers.

*You're an experienced writer and just want a chance to learn more from the best.

*You're in a dry spell, due to lack of inspiration or time.

*You love to write and want a gorgeous, inspiring retreat.


Although the emphasis is on poetry, this workshop is open to prose writers too. Rich, textured, evocative language is the province of all writers, so this workshop will be applicable to writers of fiction and memoir as well.

Lastly, there's Esalen itself. If you've been to Esalen before, you already know it's one of the most magnificent places on the planet. If you haven't, don't postpone it. It's breathtakingly beautiful and deeply nourishing. We'll be having our group meetings in the Big Yurt this year. We'll also be breaking into smaller groups for individual attention. Participants will have an opportunity to work with all three teachers.



ELLEN BASS's most recent book of poems, The Human Line, was published by Copper Canyon Press in June 2007. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973), has published several volumes of poetry, including Mules of Love (BOA, 2002) which won the Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and The Sun. She was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She is also co-author of Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth (HarperCollins 1996) and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (Harper Collins 1988, 1994), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into ten languages. She teaches in many beautiful locations and at Pacific University's MFA Program in Oregon.

DORIANNE LAUX’s fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Men, was published by W.W. Norton in February, 2011. Her fourth book, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and Smoke, as well as two fine small press editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Co-author of The Poet's Companion:  A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net. In 2001, she was invited by late poet laureate Stanley Kunitz to read at the Library of Congress. She has been teaching poetry in private and public venues since 1990 and since 2004 at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.  In the summers she teaches at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. Her poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Romanian, Dutch, Afrikkans and Brazilian Portuguese and her selected works, In a Room with a Rag in my Hand, have been translated into Arabic by Camel/Kalima Press.  Recent poems appear in Cimarron Review, Cerise Press, Margie, The Seattle Review, Tin House and The Valparaiso Review. She and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, moved to Raleigh in 2008 where she teaches poetry in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

JOSEPH MILLAR is the author of Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press.  His first collection, Overtime (2001) was finalist for the Oregon Book Award and the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.  Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, DoubleTake, New Letters, Ploughshares, Manoa, and River Styx. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, Montalvo Center for the Arts, Oregon Literary Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize in Poetry.  In 1997 he gave up his job as a telephone installation foreman to teach.  He now lives in Raleigh, NC and teaches at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program in Oregon and yearly at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. and will be a featured teacher and reader at this year's Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa has said, “There's a tenderness at the core of Fortune, where the commonplace becomes atypical and fantastical, and each poem possesses a voice that summons and reveals. Joseph Millar is a poet we can believe.” His third collection of poems, Blue Rust, will be published in fall of 2011 by Carnegie Mellon Press.


Esalen fees cover tuition, food and lodging and vary according to accommodations--ranging from $570 to $1105. The least expensive rate is for sleeping bag space which can be very comfortable, but it's limited, so you need to sign up for it early. Some work-scholarship assistance is available, as well as small prepayment discounts and senior discounts.
All arrangements and registration must be made directly with Esalen. If you have questions about the workshop itself, please email Ellen or call her at 831-426-8006.

Please register directly with Esalen
at 831-667-3005 or visit www.esalen.org

**

Enough Music

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive,
and we've talked enough and listened 
to enough music and stopped twice, 
one to eat, once to see the view, 
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.  
Maybe it's what we don't say
that saves us. 

--Dorianne Laux (from What We Carry)

*******

NATIVITY

Long after daybreak they were still trying
to deliver me,  the birth blood dropping
on the hospital tiles, glittering under the lights.
I saw my father’s corporal’s stripes,
his tan army shirt that smelled of tobacco,
I heard the cold wind no one remembers
pouring out of Canada.

My mother wrapped me up in her robe
fragrant with camphor and sweat,
hushing my desolate howls.
She loved me and she hated me
through those early months
when I wanted everything she had,
and all my father wanted
aside from her warm, pale body,
was to finish his hitch and get
the hell out of the army forever.

Each morning fine grains of salt
glinted like ice on the kitchen table
and like the insatiable mammal I was
I fastened onto her chafed, dark nipples.
They named me Rent Money
because I didn’t pay any,
 they named me Popsicle, Little Tongue, Gasser.
In August the Japanese surrendered
and he mustered out in Wisconsin.
We headed east in a ‘38 Studebaker,
its big engine swallowing the miles
of America, wheat fields and highway,
Chicago and Cleveland,
and they named me So Long
It’s Been Good to Know You.

--Joseph Millar

******

The World Has Need of You

            …everything here seems to need us…
            --Rilke

I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It's a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you've managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn't care.
But when Newton's apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.

--Ellen Bass