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Navel and Nails
He hangs from a cross, itself hanging on a nail on the wall by my desk. This hand-carved olive wood crucifix is souvenir, decoration, sermon, icon. There are days, maybe weeks when it blends into the décor. Or rather, I turn my gaze to other objects. Then it—he!—hangs and waits. Today it spoke to me.…
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The Tracks of a Small Bird
Like bent plus signs or odd tri-tined forks traced an almost Brownian path across the fine silt lining the bottom of an oblong puddle in the driveway after an April rain. I stopped and knelt down on one knee to gaze at the inscription and saw my own bowed face and the sky above reflecting…
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A Canard Rewritten
The canard asserts: We fear change. Yet we crave, we seek novelty and the next thing. This is the fuel that powers the engine of pop culture. So change per se does not frighten us. It enthralls us. We like some change. We have a taste, an appetite for it. We consume it. We desire…
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Slowing into Serenity
The patterns of the form constellate my arms and legs, creating Crane Spreads Wings, Cloud Hands, and Ride the Tiger from soothingly flowing glides of steps and waves and turns. Breathe gently, gaze calmly, listen for the echoes of memory, smooth the moves and flow like a mountain stream over rocks worn round by soft…
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Cigar Box Bands
A lidless cardboard cigar box and a fistful of rubber bands became a homemade guitar when I wrapped the open box in one rubber band, then another. The craftsmanship and skill came in arranging the rubber bands in just the right order of width and tension for plucking a scale without crushing the open box.…
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Grid Riddance
The tiller’s steel teeth bit into the soil, chewing across the garden in rows like teeth biting off kernels on a buttery cob or like the steel bits of an old Smith-Corona typing letters in neat rows across a blank page. What is it about us, or perhaps about our tools, that we impose ranks…
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Coffee Cans
Rectangular labels with red borders and white field bore hand-lettered notes–nails, screws, bolts. Dad stuck them to coffee cans, full one-pound blue tin cans rinsed free of their Maxwell House residue. Heavy with hardware, the bits of shaped and purposeful steel that reproduced like workbench dust bunnies, the cans stood in a row on the…
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No Signs Along the Way
SW 80th Ct W Old Cheney Rd 6262 No Hunting Caution Buried Cable Before digging in this vicinity please call telephone company Warning Underground Cable Call Collect 402 477 0547 Lincoln Telephone No Hunting No Hunting No Hunting or Trespassing STOP Warning Up to $500 fine and imprisonment for removing or tampering with this sign…
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Patient Waiting
The black wire rack stood in the corner of a small room near the cafeteria and waited patiently with books in arms for me to come with a few coins moist in my fist and spin it around with my free hand to bring the blue cover of Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine squeaking…
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More
Train’s low moan rolls across stubble field sifts itself through trees’ branches and like waves’ foam crawls wet sand reaches a sun-bleached shell now lifted to ear in hope of catching a whisper across a crowded world an assurance, a word that waves’ rhythmic washing is more than echo of my pulse. David M. Frye…