I was never the wise child who, hearing a patter in the leaves, tilts his open-mouthed face toward the sky. I dreamed of powerful machines with banks of dials & buttons encased in gleaming alloys, beautiful & mysterious as cathedral windows. I practiced levitation by standing on one leg — it was better than nothing. Prophesy fascinated me because of the way it made otherwise clearly random lives appear significant. I learned two different ways to hypnotize chickens. What was merely a parlor trick at first turned into a new way to make them tractable prior to execution. Adulthood came slow as a summer evening in the far north.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Bridge to Nowhere
- Natural Faculties
- (Re-)Claiming the Body
- Ceiling snakes
- Train Song
- Surgery of the Absurd
- Notes toward a taxonomy of sadness
- Weeding
- Blanket
- Forecast
- Curriculum Vitae
- Lullaby
- Fist
- On Reading The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda
- Gibbous
- Song of the Millipede
- Autumn haibun
- Bread & Water
- Jersey Shore
- Initiation
- October dusk
- Goodnight moon
- Antidote
- The Starlings
- To the Child I Never Had
- Ambitions
- Learn Harmonica Today
- Two-line haiku
- Sleeper Cell
- Unchurched
- Turnips
- Homiletics
- Magic Carpet
- When the Wind is Southerly
- Connection
- Ground Beetle
- Étude for the World’s Smallest Violin
Sigh! You show how it should be done. So much out of so little, like the perfect sleight of hand.
Your words have so much of experience tucked in.Evokes very similar feelings in me as the ones evinced here, like some thoughts forgotten somewhere, sometime.
opening lines of a novel I really want to read…
I see my own history in this, my own life’s CV. Wonderful, Dave.
I love how those last two sentences work together.
Thanks, everyone — glad you liked this. Sorry I’m not posting more often lately, but my brain doesn’t work as well in the summer.