Sting-Rays and Summer Nights - 1974
Elmira, 1974 We shouldn’t have been that far from home. That’s what I understand now. But that summer the air was thick and bright, and Mom said, “Just around town,” which in Lincoln Street language meant anywhere the road kept going.
3:13 a.m.
At 3:13 a.m. the night sharpens. Even the dark feels awake. The house holds its breath.
On Almost Beginning
One sits and reads, and the hours pass, and this passing seems not loss but a kind of staying. - adapted from Virginia Woolf’s notebooks The library was not a building but a condition sustained by attention.
And...
And is the word I use when the truth won’t fit cleanly. Family and friends. I needed both. I still do.
Prayer for 2026
Let us pray first for steadiness - not triumph, not ease, but the ability to stay when the ground feels thin.
October in Stockbridge
A New England reflection We came where Berkshire whispers dwell, To walk the streets where silence fell On painted doors and windowpanes, Where autumn’s breath through white walls strains.
The Stone I Took
I was driving somewhere, past the part of Massachusetts where maps just get tired and give up - Otis, maybe, or a town pretending to be Otis because it liked the sound of the name.
The Bench Under the Apple Tree
We made a bench one smoky day When clouds hung low and woodsmoke stayed, To sit beneath the apple tree Out front, at Boulevard and Street.
At Authors’ Ridge - 2024
For The Steady One We came not just to walk, but remember... Past Concord’s hush, past pine and ember - Where word and wind and granite sleep, And roots hold secrets buried deep. No fanfare marked the path we chose - Just lichen bloom on aging rows, And leaves like letters overhead That whispered names we’d long since read.
First Kings of Elmira - 1975
In the summer of 1975, the grass along Eldridge Park field ‘neath the old wooden roller coaster was patchy, tall in places, thin in others - but to us, it was emerald, endless, a kingdom under the slow, benevolent sun.
That One Bottle — 1989
A Memory in Sweat and Grace In Nuremberg, summer pressed its full weight down - thick as iron, bright as judgment - onto a rugby pitch ringed by trees too wise to move.
Mountainish Inhumanity
...would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth,...what would you think to be thus used? this is the strangers case; And this
What the Hands Carry
Be not solicitous for the shadow of a great name, nor for acquaintance with many… (Imitation of Christ III,24)
Unflappable
Before the sun lifted its face from the river, I was already awake, listening to the day breathe - the low cough of trucks on the road, a bird testing one clear note, my own bones answering the cold. There are mornings when the world expects panic. I give it attention instead.
That Old Zenith
Ozone blues and the hands that tried. That old Zenith sat like a dark-faced preacher, its back peeled open - a small cathedral of wire and light.
If Sylvia Had Answered the Phone
after Dr. Hook’s “ Sylvia’s Mother ” There’s a payphone by the station wall, where mercy takes small change. He feeds the coins like rosary beads, and waits for her to breathe.
