Because it tasted so good last night tonight I cooked it again: linguine alla puttanesca, spicy with hot peppers, garlic, anchovies and black olives and again we ate too much, sopping up the sauce with crusty bread, drinking the same dark wine, listening again to Billie Holiday sing “It Had to Be You” and “Sleepy …
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 …