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  • To Be Human

    after Chekhov, via Harold Clurman There once was a man who desired happiness. At odd times of the year he would feel a momentary surge of happiness but he wanted that feeling all the time. He consulted a doctor of happiness who deduced that the man craved love and recommended that he find a woman….

  • Okabe: Mount Utsu

    —Hiroshige The mountain is dyeing a long blue cloth that ripples over the rocks, cascading, a bolt of indigo the woodsman follows on his way to gather firewood. The trees reach up on bird toes to the empty sky, their gray breasts furrowed in the plunging light. A few pebbles loosen, the green hills shift…

  • from The Sleeping Sonnets

    53 And I dreamed Lao Tzu was saying, There is advantage in using what can be seen, and exists. And advantage also goes with using what cannot ever be seen, and isn't. And of a person's life the same is so. Ah so, I said, so. Some nothing is really something after all, a game…

  • Mushrooming on Olema Ridge

    Because I know a mistake can be fatal, I pick only what identifies without question, puffball, meadow mushroom, hen-of-the-woods. And though there are some delicacies I'll miss, Amanita rubescens, a pale red fruit which may or may not contain the toxin Amanita for which it is named, I prefer to proceed this way, cautiously, holding…

  • The Cherry Trees

    No salt glaze on a dish is so delicately cracked as are this morning's leaves, shelled in ice. The cherry stones still linked to the tree, the cables of the rose arbor, the hips and myrtle husks and curled threads of the Adam's Needle have clung to the clear thought of ice. Scatterings of ice…

  • Offices of Instruction

    When my mother read to us, her voice wasn't like a woman's voice. She sat on the couch and read chapters from long books. It was night, and my father was at work. He took the violin wrapped in chamois in the leather case and played at the hotel in the city. He walked across…

  • Mallards and Partridges

    I want to remember the cold mornings I spent that winter in the front seat of my uncle's ancient pickup. It was simple work, the two of us waiting for the first signs of light, listening to the steady lisp of snow over the crowns of loblolly pines. We both knew that near us speckled…