Belons

A poem I wrote some years ago, "Belons," has been published in the Autumn Issue of Foreign Literary Journal, based in South Korea, and appropriately all about the lure of foreign places, life away from home, where cultures and identities blur, intersect.

The poem is set in Brittany, Locmariaquer, and then the wrong street in Paris (a kind of exile).  It's about oysters, broken megaliths, "memories almost, or almost hope," and refers to my favorite scenes in Erich Maria Remarque's Heaven Has No Favorites, a book I've loved for nearly fifty years.




image:  Paul Gauguin, On the Cliff (Above the Sea), Brittany

Writing Spaces

A week or two here would give me wonderful material, richly flavored as with smoked paprika, figs, not quite free of the voice of troubadours.  Jean Giono would be mentioned at least once, and villages in the mountains.  Honor, and dancing after dark, after the moon slips free of the lingering evening's lees.


image:  Chisako Hamaya, Dome, slatki dome

Green Flash

Another novel excerpt has been published, this "Green Flash"—in Hawai'i rather than Crete.

"All day she thought of the dark skin of the Polynesian dancer, Gabriel, knifing into the turquoise sunshot water with its black heart (son of Pele), the bright-sailed catamaran like a Hawaiian Icarus flying into the sun, saying “it’s better at dusk.”  The green flash that her father yearned for as the sun went, swallowed into night, the yearning color of salvationout in the region where mirages live."

The publisher is Silver Stork, in their "Solais" issue—"of sunlight."

image:  Green Flash, Pekka Parvianen, NASA

Writing Spaces

As summer wanes, I'm finding myself already nostalgic for this view, this chair, this perfect window opening on the garden, the stories that might be written (or spied) while sitting there.


image:  View from a Window, Spencer Frederick Gore

Show Me the Bust of Marcus Agrippa

Lowestoft Chronicle has published the (a)gripping story of one of my foreign quests, on the verge of the new Millennium, in their Fall 2019 issue, #39.

         And so, with fall coming, with trees and late afternoon light yellowing, turning to gold (no matter if it's fools'), let us travel to Rome.

         "But after all, Agrippa is not here.  The Etruscans are here—their finely granulated gold jewelry, their etched bronze mirrors—those things you’ve seen in the art books, and roomfuls more, laid out in all their mystery and splendor.  And in the garden there are heavy-laden lime trees, and a small café where you can sit and rest your blistered feet and imagine that you have turned the clocks back and returned to summer for a little while.  All that is here, at the Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia, and for only 8000 lire (a single stroke of the delightful triple-zero key which I’ve fallen in love with on Italian ATM machines); but the marble head of Marcus Agrippa, builder of ancient Rome and second-in-command to Augustus Caesar, which we have come so many hellish miles to see, is not here. “We are Etruscans,” the old museum guard with his beetling brows and military bearing says dismissively."

image:  Vatican Museum - Hall of Busts, Saint Mary's Press

Hearing Loss

The gorgeous new issue of Catamaran has launched, and I am pleased to have a story in it—all about fear, the crippling fear of loss, and the power of music (and true love) to counter that.

In these excerpts, Marta despairs for her aging architect husband, and for herself, for what they have between them:

          "As Paul heard less and less, Marta was more and more consumed by dread, seeing no remedy at all.  Afraid of losing all the things they shared.  Afraid he couldn't love her anymore, with her essence taken away. Her words, her laugh, her always singing 'Day-O' in the shower.  The love of music that was in her bones like DNA." 

. . .

          "She grieved for him, knowing he would no longer hear songbirds, the oven timer, the thwok of tennis balls hitting the red clay court, the millions of butterfly wings like soft rain.  Couldn't hear her come home, or leave, or sit cross-legged on the big bed with its kantha quilt, playing the ukulele badly.  

            She felt that made her cease to be, like the famous old adage about a tree falling in a forest.  She'd vanished or soon would into the yawning chasm that had opened suddenly between them where there had been only pillowcase, sheet, talk of stone, water, ginkgo, old oak.  Inhabited spaces of words, of architects' materials."