Home >  Monthly Archives: October 2014

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DSC_0542

In 1961, George Martinak deeded some 100 acres of forest, bank and marshland along the Choptank River to Maryland as a “natural area for the enjoyment of all.” Last weekend, I accompanied my son’s Boy Scout troop to the park to canoe and camp.

Around sunset, I slipped away from the troop and went down to the river to take pictures. Scrambling through brambles down to the bank, I found this field of water lilies stretching along the river’s edge.

My skills as a photographer are illusory; my Nikon D90 did most of the work. The serenity is illusory too. Out-of-frame, a red-necked ski boat whipped drunken circles. Hoots of laughter trilled above the drone.

Aldo Leopold wrote of preserving some tag-ends of wilderness, but always I find the tag-ends inadequate. They are mere comely fragments. And like photography in the digital age, they are cheapened by their sheer accessibility.

The park is insufficient, as are my skills, yet I find I must take part in these insufficiencies, if only to hold on to the tag-ends of their greater ambitions, and to draw out of them something resembling, more-or-less, the ends they fail to achieve.

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Two coffees
and the daily pang
sends me to solitary_
A brushed metal stall.
And I recall
Elysium_
A beer, a cigarette
Friday
after finals.
[131]

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Ten months in bagging this job, and
Already you’re looking for a new one.
	Is progress the lie?
Or is the lie like that on a golf course,
	Where the ball just keeps rolling
	No matter where it lands?
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Joaquin says,
Try to relate to fish.
Here goes_
Tasting trail
In algal up,
Id hone to glimmer.
Bite!
Pain pulls to gasp
Blinding rud.
Panic.
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I smiled, but wanted 
  to mark it with an asterisk. 
Explain in the footnotes 
  the cliffs I scaled 
  to hang it there.
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	NON-FICTION
	«--  642-699

The girl in the gingham blouse
Peruses other worlds
	of undiscovered offices—

	DAMNED GOOD RESUMES
	COVER LETTER MAGIC
	UNLOCKING THE GMAT

She reads,
Mosquito nervous, wishing
 	down into glossy pages
For that Rockefeller Plaza Moment
When Career will take shy fingers
	into handsome hand,
Take her up that high-speed elevator
	into Bauhaus skyscape,
Into the taught and hard wood negotiations
	over 47 Hudson Acres,
	over the reverse-merger
		of Time and Value,
		of Coke and Pepsi, 
		of Jay-Z and Beyoncé_

Out to the Palladian River Walk,
	out to the long-weekend bric-a-brac shops,  
Down to the rainy, shop-bright streets,
	to the places where 
	shoes are sculptures, 
	dresses dreams_ 
To that Black Tie Renoir Wedding
	where Industry himself will
	speak his vows
	on the Willow Walk.

And from there, what?
				She sees
	the First Class duvet warmth
	of Red-Eye Starfall.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
	we’ll be landing in Madrid in thirty minutes.
Wake up love!
	The gaudy, bought boulevards
	of Old Europe are waiting…

	THE IMAGE OF SUCCESS
	THINK LIKE A WINNER
	YOUR LIFE IS CALLING

She shuts and stacks each guidebook,
	neatens the spines.
This noiseless, this doubt-filled longing. 

	NON-FICTION
	636 – 642  --»
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Fifth floor hallway
  we sometimes pass_
How goes it?
Keeping busy?

Only these aren’t really questions.
And we don’t really want to know.
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monet.wl-clouds

On the walls of the Lakeshore Retirement Community hung drowsy pastel landscapes, soft focus details of Impressionist masterpieces—Manet, Monet, Renoir—the fin de siècle avant-garde rendered balm for fading vision.

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