“Nature’s Dare”
“I saw these images and thought these thoughts. Nature harrowed me with her beauty. She attacked me and dared me to master her. As the sun, she flaunted her flames, born of a billion filaments of micro-light, a fusion of hydrogen to helium, an extrusion of the vivifying heat, the dazzle, the brilliance of all […]
Continue reading“Seduction of Nature”
“Nature was the celestial nymph of the Infinite come to seduce me. Like the seaborne semi-silk-draped enchantress in Cot’s The Storm, she floated enticingly close, near enough for me to feel her body warmth and smell the inner-earth scents of her form but too far away to capture her as my own. I could feel […]
Continue reading“The English Teacher”
“What drama and excitement there was in the classroom when Diepen first opened the pages of the great poem and begin to declaim its lines. His free left hand swept up above his head in vigorous gesticulation, pausing there momentarily before flipping up in a snap so that the palm faced the ceiling. The teacher […]
Continue reading“The Workshop”
“At times, Skylar followed his father down to the sacred space and watched him as he worked. To the boy, this was a magical, manly place, silent except for the sound of tools at work, organized to the point of perfection, filled with the wholesome smells of sawdust, oil, and Elmer’s glue. It was a […]
Continue reading“Attend, Attend!”
Across the spangled sea, upon whose ruffled surface dance the quivering mirrors of the sun’s reflected light, a thousand coded missives flash alerts. “Attend, attend!” they warn the watching eye. Attend, for here the boundless beauty of pure cosmic Truth in quick saltations springs upon your sight. The vastness of the oceanic spread, whose endlessness […]
Continue reading“Santa Cruz”
The sidewalk was brilliantly decorated with vermillion blossoms, as if the tree that formerly bore them had, like a Holi celebrant, flung richly colored powder all over the concrete. A promontory jutted far out into the Pacific like the snout of a gigantic lithic alligator. Boulders at the bottom of a cliff might have been […]
Continue reading“Under the Spell of the Moon”
“She went outside to observe the full buck supermoon. The moment she saw it, she fell under the spell of its trance magic. Waves of subtle energy streamed down from the great Luna, stripping her naked, bathing her body in soft caresses, lustrating her soul with invisible perfume. She fell completely under the power of […]
Continue reading“The Delicatessen”
“As soon as my feet met the sidewalk, they grew lighter, my legs, bouncier. Across the street was an Italian Delicatessen whose windows did for the gourmet what Gump’s did for the decorator. Four-foot-long sausages hung from the ceiling in their netted slipcovers, stamped in red and blue with pretty pictures of boats and harbors […]
Continue reading“A Special Night”
“I thought how utterly different that evening had been from any other in my life. Different not because there was high drama or intense romance, for there was neither. But different in the sense that her room had been transformed by her presence and the poet’s work into a lush and exotic island in the […]
Continue reading“Old Money”
“By now, Skylar had reached South Dartmouth Avenue, a cocoon of greenery enveloped the pedestrian from above and below and on all sides. The yards here were meadows flowing gently down to planting strips of thick grass that separated the sidewalk from the street, along which grew, in even distribution, Norway maples more than fifty […]
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