Mabuhay.
It’s been a long, good week, very productive — and I’m here again parked in the rain at a bend in the Des Plaines River. The ice on the riverbend is a soft, translucent white. The thawed parts of the riverbend are a flat brown tinged with green, gray on the surface. The bare-limbed trees [...]
65,000 gallons on land.
“The oil spill has been contained,”
an official-sounding man from Caterpillar
chirped brightly on NPR’s morning newscast.
No more wildlife will be affected –
beyond the ones already touched.
6,000 gallons of oil
sludged into the Des Plaines River.
How many blue gills?
How many herons?
How many egrets?
How many frogs?
How many salamanders and newts?
How many beavers, raccoons, button bushes?
No need [...]
Flat white Great Lakes sky,
Distant frozen fog,
Yet warm enough
for hammers
to sound on rooftops.
Men work in hooded sweatshirts,
jeans, thin tennis shoes
upon brick bungalows
that kept us warm
in the bleak months.
But the trees
stand haggard,
bare-limbed and stoic.
Maple and oak and Kentucky buckeyes -
indistinguishable to my eyes.
All stand equally stripped,
naked, vulnerable
in the diminishing chill.
Oh, how they stretch
their feathery twig tips
towards [...]
Perched securely on a branch
above my car,
the Cooper’s hawk
munched on young pigeon.
Starlings scattered,
downy feathers
drifted like summertime snow
upon my head.
A tattered yellow book, ZEN FLESH, ZEN BONES sold for 50 cents at a used book store. Thin, old tape hangs the front cover onto the manuscript’s body; the back cover is lost to moves from Los Angeles to Berkeley to Chicago. Inside, over 100 stories and problems and ancient teachings from 5 centuries of [...]