Waiting on the porch for my wife to join me for a movie and dinner, I wonder about the life I might have lived if I hadn’t stopped into the candy store I was passing that night forty-five years ago and continued down Falls Street into some different life my imagination is trying hard to …
Except for the gray pensioner with the cane staring into Shea’s closed hardware store, Delaware Avenue’s deserted, a shimmering quiet over the town. Through a window open on Lehigh Street the murmur of a baseball game. A bachelor who spent a late night at the Sokol Hall dozes on a front room couch. In the …
The last one to wake, I hear voices, soft laughter rising from the kitchen, the aroma of coffee and toast. After last night’s thunderstorm the air so light and clear. Oh, how glad I am to slowly take on flesh and enter the rooms of the living.
Barefoot in the wet grass, I stare at the scarred cherry tree I almost put the chainsaw to, now in full leaf, and the brick patio I laid down with its café table, four chairs and an unobstructed view of the sky. How lucky I am the light finds me here on this curve on …
The canal ice is littered with stones boys have thrown trying to break through the thickness. When the thaw comes, the sudden warmth will call the boys out in T-shirts to play ball or turn their heads for the first time toward a passing girl, and the frozen-tight world will unfasten, the forgotten stones dropping, …
The restaurant deck overlooking the lower Niagara is closed, tables and chairs taken inside for the winter. The only one here, I stare down at the wide, green river, the swirling gulls, a fisherman’s small outboard. If you were with me, I’d tell you what I learned from the book I was reading this morning: …
For Lonnie, in Memoriam Buried in a shoebox of fading photographs is one of you, a sun-browned boy wearing a red, white and blue T-shirt circled with the words swim-surf-sun-run, standing under the bowed branches of the mock orange, staring warily into the camera, idling for a moment before you race away to play with …
Vyslobods nas, Pan, I whisper to myself as the ambulance screams past the house, Slovak words my grandfather spoke whenever a siren or a funeral lifted his head from his soup or the ground he was planting, words that rise in me now, sitting in darkness, watching the passed houses glow for a moment in …