a maroon leaf drops stem to stem with a yellow an autumn death pact My mother is 101. She lives in a home. She had a private room until last month. Until her privacy didn’t matter because reality doesn’t matter. Because I live half-a-country away, I never met the new roommate. Until my visit last …
By the way, when Basho takes his Narrow Road to The Deep North, he is walking a path that leads him to, through, and around the very area in Japan that is suffering the nuclear disaster. Asaka, now Fukushima, he describes as wooded. It is here, if I recall correctly, that he searches in vain …
I never saw Saigon. In 1970, I was stationed at Camp Radcliff next to the village of An Khe in the Central Highlands. I was assigned to the army’s 4th Infantry Division. The 4th lived way north of Saigon. But in March of 1975, a month before The Fall Of Saigon, I lived in Dallas …
I don’t know why the young must die. I fought in a war, but I don’t understand war. I don’t understood why the memory of one war isn’t enough to horrify us when we hear the rumor of a second. I spent a week, ten days maybe, on a little island in the Outer Hebrides, …
Memorial Day: We should mourn for all who have died because of militarism. May 31, 1993 I remember the first time I prayed for an enemy. It was just outside An Khe, a village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. A helicopter gunship rocketed some North Vietnamese regulars who were about to attack us. I …
Perhaps the most memorable character from the First World War is “The Red Baron.” Manfred Von Richthofen died about 11 AM on Sunday, the 21st of April in 1918. There is almost nothing about his death that is not disputed, the exact time, the manner of death, even who shot him. But there is one …
I generally share my poems with a few friends before I mail them out. A sample audience, as it were. Because of this, I’ve been asked how I came to write the enclosed, as the voice and tone are different from poems I’ve written lately. Perhaps the following note, written to a friend and editor, …
My mother is slipping slowly now. She has no sense of the real world around her. Yesterday, she told my sister that she is flying. When sis asked her where she’s flying to, Mother answered, “To heaven.” I find myself in this strange world that my wife Phoebe calls, simply, a death watch. I’m …