poem
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Easter
The sparrowhawk sees The extreme angle Of the most extreme The iron nails The bloody stream In darkening sky Amongst the thieves The cross stood high A tree bereft of leaves. Hung now upon to die One called teacher, rabbi No crime convicted in his youth Nailed here for speaking Truth. Before, in the…
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Waterhouse’s Women
Canvas has teeth to catch the smear of pigment that comes off a brush it has a fighting spirit that resists assault, that provides firm backing as long as its stretched tight and nailed to a frame like Christ to his cross. It takes some time to warm his hands up, to dip and…
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Enola Gay Tibbits
Imagine being Enola Gay waiting there that appointed day when the silver wings your young son brings drop down upon the scene with a button press, a short caress the bright, resultant light cascading atoms fusing (and the rising sun set losing). Now carbon shadows bridge the gaps where school kids once ran laps…
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Arthur C. Clarke Writes ‘2001’
Arthur C. Clarke sits at his desk in the Hotel Chelsea he’s wearing a crimson paisley sarong and a pair of beaten up thongs his fingers jackhammer the keys of a portable typewriter each thrust and parry of his and Stanley’s conversations are focused into movement on paper. The story is being written. He can…
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Memories of ’89
There was a moment, in those dark days when we dreamed of putting our stars there together – one gold, fifty white. On the Red planet, on the god of war so we wouldn’t have to meet him on the battlefield. We schoolboys ducking under our desks the quaking of Southern California ground not as…
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Joni Mitchell Cries
She cried when they walked on the moon she was inconsolable hyperkinetic. She will never be that young again never so full of life as that summer of 1969 when two men scrabbled over rocks and dust and looked back at the planet they came from, a small blue oval graffitied by white hanging in…
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Tower of Babel
Such sumptuous beauty of the hidden soul made manifest in the arches and the rocks and stone blended into concrete massed into shape heart beating heavy as marble covers rough patches added grace and monumental powers push down into the earth shouldering burdens as always, man-made here the piers, hear them vibrating in groaning exaltation…
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No Big Decision
Truman sat and stared out of an Oval Office window the rose garden was bare and the old President dead. Here before him was a weapon to cease all war unspeakable destruction, but unspeakable attraction. He was shown the footage a mushroom cloud rising from the desert floor briefly a new sun in the dark…
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War to End War
They’re all dead and have become legend the chewing of the mice in the mud and the groaning of the brothers trapped on barbed wires as the bullets screamed into their heads who could believe it happened? Who could believe that the gas volumetrically flowed over white and tired faces their gasmasks loose as…
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Herculaneum (morning)
Tufa, its all tufa underfoot and of course Mount Vesuvius stands beyond – mist obscuring the upper slopes. Cold rain, so unusual falls and fills the pool in the courtyard porphyry tiles, marble tiles amplified and magnified under the water, the amplitude of drops creating overlapping wave fronts obscuring designs of little brown clams and…
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We Return to the Sea
They returned to the sea (the sea we all crossed, some in chains) the Atlantic cold in wintertime (but they’re too far south for icebergs) off the coast under blue sky and turbulent clouds and the rays of the sun 93 million miles away, which penetrate the calmly churning ocean, scintillate in verdigris slanting through…
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Frozen Waltz
Those long marching columns of Slavic men, moving feet to rhythms immoral, unpluralistic uniforms flashy enameled buttons and badges shinning well-timed clouds of breath issuing on each exhale in Red Square. The television, garish color and static of NTSC, those tanks roll and those feet go solid and secure they sing: Sing to…
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Evening Walk
Under that stifling proto-summer heat the evergreens sag and the past-dusk sky holds burning red Mars air clear and turbulence low he’s reflecting the missing sun. Two men stand under a street lamp smoking a joint they pass back and forth conversing in Spanglish and I am hearing in memory Beethoven’s Romance for Violin and…
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26 April 1986
I don’t know what I am doing but that’s just how it goes from this control room I can see a march of lights bright red and gold like May Day in Moscow missles rolling away on diesel trucks the crowds in awe at apparatchiks in uniform vibrations underfoot like the stamping feet of endless…
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Alpha Centauri
I will be in my sixties when the first signals from probes to Alpha Centauri cross the emptiness and those once hidden there become known family. Three stars three sisters of Sol would be near enough to our machines to be distinct added to the photo album of one time visitations. Before they…
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“What is Truth?”
His hands dipped into the cold water one washing the other – how fine these fingers used to be – the slightly yellowed edges of his woolen wrap dampened, the purple stripe vivid even under the sunshade “where does that purple come from,” he thinks someone told him once about a snail in the ocean…
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Sci-Fi Society
We were young crowded around those tables knocking elbows cockeyed looking at the ladies trying to be suave trying to be Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart with Cagney faces but we played fire with words hitting keys hard typewriters splintering that wide future seductive, erotic in the way virgin boys dreamed about it while the…
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Sedimentary Layers
His name was Orville born in 1932 when his father’s hero still flew But this Orville saw the ground as pleasant enough. The layers of sediment caught his boyhood interest, finding ancient Indian arrowheads in the loaming earth. He ached for the feel of a spade as it entered the soft and easily forgiving soil…
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Imperial Hotel
Slow drizzle of rain the streets saturated Meiji era ending the new emperor ascending. Porcelain waiting under paper umbrellas, rustling. Tokyo midway from medieval flashfire wooden, newborn modern. Encapsulated, brick and tile with angles borrowed from here not imprisoned palaces brought by Europeans to mar the landscape. Here Ōya stones become glyphs, this seasoned lava…
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El Nino
Its Southern California and there is a raging river by my home – rain a miracle in the worst of times so much of it that the bleached-white teeth of the weathermen shimmer when the “Stormwatch ‘97” graphics flash on the TV screen. No one could’ve anticipated the deluge, running rapid down the channels of…
The Numinous Cosmos 