Balconies

 

“Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.”

—Ernie Pyle

 

“The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows.”

—Donald G. Mitchell

 

(above,) This lovely balcony in Palma de Mallorca, bringing memories of peace and hope and other worlds.

And this, (below,) in San Juan Bautista, holding a small flight of angels—if fewer than on that famous pin.

And whimsey in Paris one year, a flight of chefs.

 

And this, and this.  Verona and a very famous balcony.  Flights of fancy.

 

"She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."

—J.D. Salinger

images:  Christie B. Cochrell

Deus ex machina

 

Flames of Hope

 

I’m thinking of the powers of light, which include Sarastro, child spirits and flutes, the wonderful animal puppets of Julie Taymor!  Mozart, behind and inside all of that. 

 

And caravans, in their historical meaning—pilgrims and camels and banners of faith and fellowship.  "Allowing for the exchange of goods [salt and textiles; stone, spices, copper, gold] and ideas [in words] across long distances."  A group of people journeying together, most often through desert or hostile regions.

  

All carrying shimmering flames of hope.

 

images:  The Catalan Atlas; Shutterstock:  Camel caravan in Souq Okaz Festival

Italian Hand Gestures

 

Originally published by Dime Show Review (now defunct) in early 2017, my whimsical and wistful story "Italian Hand Gestures" has been reprinted now by Doubleback Review (Issue 7:2 - October 2025).

 

The story is (first) about a self-conscious stutterer's discovery of the liberating world of hand gestures to express everything he couldn't convey otherwise.

 

"He especially liked the gesture where the hand moved level over the top of the head, meaning drily, 'go jump in a lake.'  He learned to tilt his hand slightly to specify which lake he had in mind—the lazy length of Lake Como, smoky and blue with late summer bonfires burning tendrils of old grape vine; the gusty German holiday-making shores of Lake Garda with garish bursts of sails; the chilly mirror of a snow-fed lake in the Alps down from the St. Bernard Pass, where the great dogs are raised and archaeologists scour the bedrock for traces of a Roman temple to Jupiter.

         Within just a few weeks, freed as he was from the impediments and hesitations of regular speech, Sam got into the more difficult signs.  The one that cries out with daring insouciance 'bring me some octopus!'  The one that asks 'is the blue of your eyes what the Renaissance artists made from lapis lazuli and called azzuro oltramarino?'  And that gentle flutter of the left-hand fingers against the palm of the other, half-reaching hand, that recalls in a quiet singsong how the sun brushed the pink-throated yellow roses on the morning of your great-grandparents' wedding day before the vows, I, Albert, take you, Nora."

 

 

Image:  Photo by Nahid Hatami on Unsplash

 

The Great Beyond

An appropriate story for this time of the year, Halloween Eve—a story of a ghostly haunting in northern New Mexico, was published earlier this month in Grande Dame Literary Journal.

A spiteful poltergeist, the family matriarch as it happens, is troubling the chapel she loved to retreat to in life—the now ruinous chapel next to the magical Tower of the Riddles, an adobe observatory and place of riddling the skies, initially intended as a belltower for the religious structure just below it on the hill, though the cast iron mission bell purchased in Mexico by one of the daughters had been lost in transit and never replaced.

 

When a frequent visitor to the Las Trampas ranch "asked Reuben [once her science teacher] to explain about the riddles in the tower's name, one summer night when they were studying the rings of Saturn, spectral bands of ice and rock and dust, he'd looked up from the eyepiece of the telescope and after thinking for a moment quoted the Neruda lines which he'd been taken with.  (Neruda's love of the natural world matching his own).

'the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.'"

 

 

image:  New Mexico, photographer unknown

Translations

 

I'm reading blackberries, translating them to clafoutis.

It is the day after the day of translations, the letters 

and their combinations played like chesspieces 

across the indeterminable board, vast and extraordinary

as the famous piazza where life itself has often been

played out, between the great Basilica and the timeless cafés,

where erstwhile spies, or lovers lost or not yet happened on,

or in the old days Mozart, Byron, Casanova, men with 

one of those "ways with words," and in that sea of chairs

and little tables too contessas, students of art history, sopranos

all sit whiling away hours, watching others wait and watch, 

sip cioccolata in tazza, caffè del Doge, un calice di Champagne

—or a bottle in its entirety, translated in a sorcerous instant

to frosted silver, moonrise, glass.  One of the nocturnes 

of the magician of tones famous for eking light from night. 

 

 

 

image:  James Whistler, Nocturne:  Blue and Gold, St. Mark's, Venice

Greek Unorthodox

 

A fifth excerpt of my hypothetical Crete novel, Reading the Stones, has been published online by Scrawl Place (great name)—"part visitor’s guide, part travelogue, part literary journal.  It’s meant for readers who prefer Bashō to Lonely Planet."

 

This is another segment of Anna's story, called "Greek Orthodox," and follows "Octopus" (Lowestoft Chronicle, Spring 2019), "Blue Monkeys" (Belle Ombre, March 2019), "Naxos" (Mediterranean Poetry, 2019), and a stand-alone segment featuring the novel's other main character, Mar—"Green Flash" (Silver Stork, September 2019).

 

Yet another portion of the novel was rewritten for different characters, with a different focus, as the story "Without Trace," and published by Halfway Down the Stairs (Frontiers issue) in March 2022.

 

"Greek Orthodox" takes place in Chaniá, on the northwestern shore of Crete, mostly in the agora (buying a red mullet and bit of feta; other days fish soup, various types of pite, the time-honored Greek pies), and various churches.  Eighty-year-old Anna loving what's there ("colorful as all get-out, she’d be the first to agree"), and always, achingly, the man who's still vividly with her in memory; but longing for her old, familiar home ("my own small fiefdom") back in Philadelphia, where she becomes resolved to return.

 

"A sunbeam fell through a high, crossed window—meant, charged.  Half the time she wondered whether religion wasn’t all about aesthetics.  Like theatre, it involved putting on a good show, lest your audience quickly lose interest.  Her eye followed the commanding beam of light that cut across the dawdling arches straight and sure, like a theatre spot.  A spotlight was meant to highlight faces, the action at dramatic center stage where the whisper was happening.  But moving into it, she was aware only of gold.  A field of gold.  A sown field and a battlefield.  (She would have to start incorporating gold into her paintings, it had such a dazzling effect.)  The dizzy gold of bees of saints of all the wisdom of antiquity passed down through scholars’ hands, hushed and guarded as religion, forbidden as passion."

 

 

 

image:  View of Agia Aikaterini church, Chania old town, Wikimedia Commons