Tag: sonnet
-
Monday’s Bananas
Do not expect to find ripe bananasat the market on Monday afternoon.Those being placed now around the fruit stand,piled on last week’s brown-spotted assortment,are all an unpromising shade of green -tedious to peel with firm, chalky fleshthat besmirches teeth, ruins appetite -nausea’s hue aboard a sea-tossed vessel.Shameful how they made this misbegotten tripfrom plantation to…
-
Idioms of an Expert Backseat Driver
Grandpa Jack was a retired union man of McLean trucking, and the keenest back- seat driver I have ever known. “Watch out for old snake hips!” he’d blurt every time another car came anywhere close to us. I never learned why that expression, but got the message and gave a wide berth. Whistling hymns through…
-
The People Who You Never Get to Love
after Rupert Holmes As the song describes, there are so many missed connections, chances at love that go unrealized, attractive people with whom you will exchange no more than eye contact. But these are not losses in Cupid’s game; they are amorous possibilities left in the wake of his arrow – shot true off a…
-
Stanford Dish
A herd of cows blocked our way down the hill, strewn across the path as if they were boulders. Since a barbed wire fence stretched out to either side, there was no going around them. Spooked by their number, by their restlessness – by the sheer muscular bulk of each one – we stepped back…
-
Buddha’s Hand
After nightfall, she leads me through a gate into the garden behind the barn. A floodlight nestled where the eaves meet at the apex of the roof shines down. There is a modest shrub whose amber fruit reaches from the shadows with many gnarled, elongated fingers, splayed in a gesture that appears both to beckon…
-
After a First Date
“Let’s be in touch!” she said, after we spent what I thought was a pleasant couple hours together, walking the Stanford Dish trail on a glorious day, the sun shining. We marveled at a coyote leaping across a field so lush and green from all the recent downpours, we talked affably, we reminisced – and…
-
Post Drought, 2017
The last drought was brutal to reservoirs. Moisture disappeared, leaving behind a vast alien landscape of craters, parched and absent their usual fill. Now, after more storms than we thought likely, lakes have returned to their abandoned beds and soil throughout the county drank enough so that groundwater is somewhat replenished. What is to be…
-
Elk of Tomales Point
Rain has collected inside a basin at the bottom of a hill on a spit of land between wind-whipped Tomales Bay and an ocean shoreline pounded by waves. Mirror-flat, reflecting a cloudless sky with serene, blue stillness, it is precious as a source of freshwater for the herd of tule elk who linger around it.…
-
The Buckeye Trail
After we cross the river the first time, we walk a quarter mile in our bare feet, avoiding horse manure, sharp stones, and twigs. The path is a mere wisp of loam woven among giant redwoods in a forest carpeted with ferns and decorated with forget-me-nots. We can feel damp soil each time our heels…
-
Bonsai
Within a hexagonal pagoda there sits a compact hinoki cypress begun in 1737. A dragon is molded into its pot. How many vessels has it shed during the past 285 years? The form of a towering, ancient pine rendered entirely in miniature by the patience of ten generations. In a moment, eyes can ascend its…
From the Firefly Galaxy 