The soul is hungry in spring, and there is only the crisp, silent air to feed it.
I smell the earth for the first time as I take a walk, my first in many months of being housebound.
It is a relief just to breathe again without a shudder. The past has been very hard on us, with the terrible vengeance of a disease we can’t control, a government in tatters from the lies and treachery of a tyrant eager to become a New World Putin.
Ghosts wear snow in the early morning hours and walk around like debutants at a ball. The wind lifts the hems of their long dresses and there is nothing beneath but a few dog tracks. How lonely it must be to be dead.
He knew the rotting nature of poverty and the dull, disintegrating poison of lost hope. He had some of the dark anger of Walt Whitman, who could charm a winter tree back into bloom with his dreams and turn on his heels and find despair tearing at the entrails of the ordinary man.
Nothing stirs but the wind that rattles rain gutters and pulls on the hinges of blistered shutters. A pair of boots has been left out on a patio of gray flagstones, the mud still clinging to their heels like forgotten promises.
I am beginning to believe democracy survived a profound crisis, and is about to show that a flimsy idea proved itself as durable as the trunk of an ancient maple tree.
The wind last night was fierce and numbingly cold. It moved like a carving knife through the remaining remnants of summer, easing away the reluctant last memories we have of the warm and sunny past.
No one seems to know what to think or how to feel right now. The stress is building and the threats to this election are so poisonous, it makes you quiver with fear.
Leaf by leaf, the sky unfolds its ancient sunlight and lets the fragments of history drift to the ground, one broken fact at a time. How difficult it is to gather up the ruins of time and try to make sense of what we are — the foreground we emerged from, the burden of our legacy as inheritors of shame and guilt.
I woke up this morning to a chill in the air. I closed the bedroom windows and shivered into my clothes, then hurried down to the kitchen to consult the … Continue reading →
Trump’s house of cards is built on ruses and Iago-like deceptions, a palace of flimsy lies waiting for the door to fly open and a gust of honest wind to sweep them all away.
I am hopeful again, a man who has awakened from a long dream to find that heaven has opened its granary at last and spilled this nourishment down upon each of us, all of us.
I am possessed of a brooding spirit, some ominous angel who has landed on my shoulders, staring at my ear. It wants to know why I do not understand silence, the poetry of space.