98. Ars poetica

Yesterday I posted (among other poems by Rita Dove) an ars poetica, and commented how much I enjoy these explorations of "the art of poetry." As the Poetry Foundation defines the genre, "Ars poetica . . . [refers] to a poem, treatise, or essay written by a poet about the nature, purpose, and craft of poetry itself. It acts as a 'poem about poetry,' exploring how and why poems are created, often offering advice on poetic style or defining the role of the poet." 

The term originated with the Roman poet Horace’s Epistula ad Pisones (c. 19 BC), a 476-line letter advising on poetic craft (conciseness, unity, and style). In it he wrote, "As is painting, so is poetry: some pieces will strike you more if you stand near, and some, if you are at a greater distance: one loves the dark; another, which is not afraid of the critic’s subtle judgment, chooses to be seen in the light; the one has pleased once the other will give pleasure if ten times repeated."

The term is also well known from Archibald MacLeish's poem, with its pithy final couplet:

Ars Poetica 

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

But what brought me here today was stumbling (good ol' FB) on the following poem, which got me searching for more, a couple of which I present to you here. (There are many, many, many more.)

Mugged by Poetry

by Dorianne Laux

—for Tony Hoagland, who sent me a handmade chapbook made from old postcards called OMIGOD POETRY with a whale breaching off the coast of New Jersey and seven of his favorite poems by various authors typed up, taped on, and tied together with a broken shoelace.

Reading a good one can make me love the one who wrote it,
as well as the animal or element or planet or person
the poet wrote it for. I end up as I always do,
flat on my back like a drunk in the grass, loving the world.
Like right now, I'm reading a poem called "Summer"
by John Ashbery, whose poems I never much cared for,
and suddenly in the dead of winter, There is that sound
like the wind / Forgetting in the branches that means
something / Nobody can translate . . . I fall in love
with that line, can actually hear it (not the line
but the wind) and it's summer again and I forget
I don't like John Ashbery poems. So I light a cigarette
and read another by Zbigniew Herbert, a poet
I've always admired but haven't read enough of, called
"To Marcus Aurelius" that begins Good night Marcus
put out the light / and shut the book For overhead / is raised
a gold alarm of stars . . . First of all I suddenly love
anyone with the name Zbigniew. Second of all I love
anyone who speaks in all sincerity to the dead
and by doing so brings that personage back to life,
plunging a hand through the past to flip on the light.
The astral physics of it just floors me. Third of all
is that "gold alarm of stars . . ." By now I'm a goner,
and even though I have to get up tomorrow at 6 am
I forge ahead and read "God's Justice" by Anne Carson,
another whose poems I'm not overly fond of
but don't actively disdain. I keep reading one line
over and over, hovering above it like a speckled starling
spying on the dragonfly with turquoise dots all down its back
like Lauren Bacall. Like Lauren Bacall!! Well hell,
I could do this all night. I could be in love like this
for the rest of my life, with everything in the expanding
universe and whatever else might be beyond it
that we can't grind a lens big enough to see. I light up
another smoke, maybe the one that will kill me,
and go outside to listen to the moon scalding
the iced trees. What, I ask you, will become of me?

Ars Poetica

by José Olivarez

Migration is derived from the word “migrate,” which is a verb defined by Merriam-Webster as “to move from one country, place, or locality to another.” Plot twist: migration never ends. My parents moved from Jalisco, México to Chicago in 1987. They were dislocated from México by capitalism, and they arrived in Chicago just in time to be dislocated by capitalism. Question: is migration possible if there is no “other” land to arrive in. My work: to imagine. My family started migrating in 1987 and they never stopped. I was born mid-migration. I’ve made my home in that motion. Let me try again: I tried to become American, but America is toxic. I tried to become Mexican, but México is toxic. My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned. In other words: just because it is art doesn’t mean it is inherently nonviolent. My work: to write poems that make my people feel safe, seen, or otherwise loved. My work: to make my enemies feel afraid, angry, or otherwise ignored. My people: my people. My enemies: capitalism. Susan Sontag: “victims are interested in the representation of their own 
sufferings.” Remix: survivors are interested in the representation of their own survival. My work: survival. Question: Why poems? Answer:

Another, longer, prose example is "Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2" by Krista Franklin.

Ars Poetica

by Joseph Millar (who happens to be Dorianne Laux's husband)

Your friends tell you the writing
is good but you’re not actually buying it—
so much idle conversation, you think,
overheard through a hotel window
by a cab driver half asleep in the sun
instead of an ode or a psalm—

and waiting near the ER for your wife
who has just broken her arm,
reading a translation of Hafez or Tagore
can make you feel godless and small
since you’re not Neil Young or François Villon
though on such a day or night as this
you hear the footsteps along the sidewalk
and here comes the old shadow again
like the promise of late-season rain
which you hope will keep falling
into the earth, its rivers and deserts,
its alleys and streets
and the wild and wastrel ocean.

Essay on Craft

by Ocean Vuong (whose reading you can listen to here)

Because the butterfly’s yellow wing
flickering in black mud
was a word
stranded by its language.
Because no one else
was coming — & I ran
out of reasons.
So I gathered fistfuls
of  ash, dark as ink,
hammered them
into marrow, into
a skull thick
enough to keep
the gentle curse
of  dreams. Yes, I aimed
for mercy — 
but came only close
as building a cage
around the heart. Shutters
over the eyes. Yes,
I gave it hands
despite knowing
that to stretch that clay slab
into five blades of light,
I would go
too far. Because I, too,
needed a place
to hold me. So I dipped
my fingers back
into the fire, pried open
the lower face
until the wound widened
into a throat,
until every leaf shook silver
with that god
-awful scream
& I was done.
& it was human.

Finally, I refer you to a Ploughshares article that briefly explores three contemporary ars poeticas: Dana Levin's "Ars Poetica (cocoons)," Terrance Hayes's "Ars Poetica with Bacon," and Dorothea Lasky's "Ars Poetica." Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter" is another, slant example of an ars poetica.

Poetry Foundation has a "learning prompt" on the genre, which includes the following questions:

Why do you write? Who do you write for?
What do you write about?
What does writing do for you? What do you want writing to do for other people?
What do you find limiting about writing?
What does not show up in your poems or in “traditional poetry” that you wish did?
Where have you been? Where are you going?
What’s a story people should know about you?
What do you want?
What did you used to think? What do you think now?
What or who do you love? What or who do you detest?

Answer those, and you can write your own! 

97. Rita Dove, poet

I know the name Rita Dove, but I don't know her work. But as FB does so well (or so annoyingly, depending on the subject), yesterday for some reason it served Rita Dove up in my stream. It was a photo from 1977 of her and her then-thirty-year-old husband Fred, on Padre Island, Texas, posted on the occasion of Fred's 79th birthday. And because I looked more closely at that entry, Rita showed up again later in my feed, with a reference to a NYT essay by Roger Rosenblatt, a "love letter to old ladies." 

Now, Rita Dove is only 73, which I don't think qualifies just yet as an "old lady." But I'm glad he included her, because that essay caused me to seek her out. Here's what he says about her:

My friend the sublime poet Rita Dove wrote lyrical poems as a young woman. They were innocent explorations of wonder. In her later poems she has become a sassy, punning old lady in the know. A recent book, “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” shows her in control of all she sees. I did a reading with her a couple of years ago. I was floored by her quiet self-assurance — like an orchestra conductor, in command of all the instruments in the world.

Rita Dove was the first African American Poet Laureate of the United States (1993–95) and won the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection, Thomas and Beulah (1986). She is now vice president for literature at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she has taught since 1989. Her honors and activities go on and on; you can read more about her here.

So here are just a few of her poems, including a prose poem. I am already looking forward to reading more. The first one is from Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021).

Prose in a Small Space

It’s supposed to be prose if it runs on and on, isn’t it?  All those words, too many to fall into rank and file, stumbling bareassed drunk onto the field reporting for duty, yessir, spilling out as shamelessly as the glut from a megabillion dollar chemical facility, just the amount of glittering effluvium it takes to transport a little girl across a room, beige carpet thick under her oxfords, curtains blowzy with spring — is that the scent of daffodils drifting in?

Daffodils don’t smell but prose doesn’t care.  Prose likes to hear itself talk; prose is development and denouement, anticipation hovering near the canapés, lust rampant in the antipasta — e.g., a silver fork fingered sadly as the heroine crumples a linen napkin in her lap to keep from crying out at the sight of Lord Campion’s regal brow inclined tenderly toward the wealthy young widow . . . prose applauds such syntactical dalliances.

Then is it poetry if it’s confined?  Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention — Over here! It’s me! — while the white spaces (air, field, early morning silence before the school bell) shape themselves around that one bright seizure . . . and if that’s so what do we have here, a dream or three paragraphs?  We have white space too; is this music?  As for all the words left out, banging at the gates . . . we could let them in, but where would we go with our orders, our stuttering pride?

The next one is from the October 20, 2025, New Yorker, and it gets at what Rosenblatt called her sassiness. You can hear Rita read it here.

For the Birds 

Cardinal Rule No. 1: Duck
if necessary. Don’t be
the canary in the coal mine
unless you like playing cards
with the devil and his stool pigeons.
Usually, the unassuming won’t show up
onscreen; no one remembers enough
to describe the ordinary wren
nesting in the elm outside their window
after the eagle swoops down
for a snack. So much for blending in:
Who’s the turkey now?

Here are a couple from 1989:

Canary

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

The Breathing and the Endless News

Every god is lonely, an exile
composed of parts: elk horn,
cloven hoof. Receptacle

for wishes, each god is empty
without us, penitent,
raking our yards into windblown piles. . . . 

Children know this; they are
the trailings of gods. Their eyes
hold nothing at birth then fill slowly

with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls,
out for the count, each toe pouting from
the slumped-over toddler clothes:

no blossoming there. So we 
give our children dolls, and
they know just what to do—

line them up and shoot them.
With every execution
doll and god grow stronger.

Finally, here's one from 1987, because I'm a sucker for ars poeticas:

Ars Poetica

Thirty miles to the only decent restaurant
was nothing, a blink
in the long dull stare of Wyoming.
Halfway there the unknown but terribly
important essayist yelled Stop!
I wanna be in this;
and walked fifteen yards into the land
before sky bore down and he came running,
crying Jesus—there's nothing out there!

I once met an Australian novelist
who told me he never learned to cook
because it robbed creative energy.
What he wanted most was
to be mute; he stacked up pages;
he entered each day with an ax.

What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.

I could go on and on, but this gives a taste. You can find more of her poems at the Poetry Foundation, and I'll end with a documentary film made in 2014 by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. I haven't watched it yet, but I will.

Book Report: The Question of Bruno

9. Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno (2000) (4/15/26)

This book is labeled "stories," and although I expect not all of the eight stories are completely autobiographical (the book is not labeled "memoir"), they all ring true to lived experience. Hemon was born in Sarajevo (then Yugoslavia) in 1964, and made his way to the U.S. in 1992, where he has lived since.

The Question of Bruno begins with "Islands," relating in short sections aspects of a childhood holiday on an island off the Bosnian coast—family interactions, family stories, that place and time. Some of the family stories are of atrocities under Stalin, but these are (almost) overwhelmed by swims in the sea and wonderful feasts, sweet interactions with loved ones. 

The next two stories are about an imagined forester, Alphonse Kauders, presented as a work of research, and a real spy, Richard Sorge, who informs the young Aleksandar's imaginings about his own father as a spy—though the truth proves sadder. 

"The Accordion" takes us to the moment when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914—and a relative of Hemon's happened to be in the throng, playing his accordion.

"Exchange of Pleasant Words" recounts a family reunion—a Hemoniad—following the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, with attendant family history stretching from Ukraine and Bosnia back to Brittany and even Greece.

"A Coin" consists of love letters that focus on survival: getting from point A to point B in Sarajevo without being dropped by a sniper, and all the life lived in between.

"Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls" (the title is a reference to the narrator's youthful rock band in Sarajevo) is about a young man who comes to the U.S. and ends up staying, though he doesn't speak the language and he has no prospects. But he makes do, working all manner of odd jobs. (The book's title comes from this chapter, where a doddery old woman keeps asking, "Where's Bruno?")

And finally, there's "Imitation of Life," told from the perspective of a young boy in Tito's Sarajevo. The "imitation" concerns movies—all the stories we tell and are told, all the stories we want to believe. 

It took me a while to finish this book, though it's short. I liked it well enough at the start, but by the end I was a bit bored by all the "telling detail." The first few stories grabbed me the most. Still, I'm glad I read it. It gives a good perspective on lives that I do not know first-hand: lives in wartorn places, the immigrant's life. It stirs up imagination and empathy, both of which seem to be lacking these days...

96. Just poking around the universe

This afternoon the Artemis II successfully completed its mission with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Wonderful! Big applause for the dreaming, for the science, for the engineering, for getting some new glimpses of our fragile planet from space and for totally new views of the moon's backside! 

Meanwhile, I've been wondering how the ship slowed down from its 24,000 mph hurtle through deep space to a mere 17 mph as it approached the Earth's surface. I haven't found answers that satisfy me—those that I have found include aerobraking and eleven parachutes. (The best source of information I found was a thread on Reddit, but still—I'd really love a nifty video direct from NASA. NASA—do you hear me?) 

Anyway, as I wandered through the internet, I got to wondering about our atmosphere—which was ostensibly helping to put the brakes on the Artemis II. And once again, as so often, I realized (with some delight: there's so much to learn!) how ignorant I am. Check out this rather simplistic illustration:

So, what really slays me here is the Thermosphere, with temperatures from 930°F to 3600°F. This right after the Mesosphere, with a high temp of 5°F. What? And then, beyond the Thermosphere: absolute zero. How is that even possible? 

As a certain scientific type in this household explained, it doesn't mean the Thermosphere is hot. There are very, very few molecules out there. But what molecules there are (mainly atomic and molecular oxygen, molecular nitrogen, and atomic helium), they have a high temperature. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. Why are they so high-temp? (The short answer is that they directly absorb intense, high-energy UV and X-ray radiation from the sun.) 

And now I'm resisting doing further research into the auroras—are they super high-temp too? But not hot? What is hot? What is cold? What exactly is an aurora? I'm so confused...

And then finally, I'm not even sure where this came from—it could be Mr. Science mentioned it—I learned that Elon Musk has launched over 10,000 LEO (low earth-orbit) Starlink satellites in the last seven years (since 2019). His plan is to have 1 million satellites as orbital data centers, "addressing the immense energy needs of AI on Earth." The 10,000 are already making earth-based astronomy harder to do. But 1 million? And for AfuckingI?I am beyond horrified.

Until last year, said satellites orbited at 550 km (340 miles), but they've now lowered the orbit to 480 km (298 miles) "to increase safety by reducing space debris and enabling faster re-entry of inactive satellites." Now I need to find out what "re-entry of inactive satellites" actually means.  

There's so much I don't know. But I have to say, it was a relief to venture imaginatively into space today, and avoid the earth-bound news, which never fails to be infuriating anymore. 

Book Report: Purgatory Ridge

8. William Kent Krueger, Purgatory Ridge (2001) (4/3/26)

Book #3 in the Cork O'Connor series (my reports on the first two are here and here), about an ex-sheriff in the small northern Minnesota town of Aurora. Cork is half Ojibwe, and the town is cheek by jowl with an Indian reservation, so some of the plot elements tie in with the cultural tensions following an explosion at a lumber mill in which a Native elder is killed. Accident? eco-terror? What about the nearby stand of white pines: who should have access, those who revere the Old Grandfathers, as the trees are known, as sacred, or the owner of the lumber mill, Karl Lindstrom, who after all provides employment to a good number of townsfolk? 

The book opens, however, with a twelve-year-old incident on Lake Superior when, in a violent storm, an ore carrier sinks and all but one aboard die. The one who survives, half-Native John LePere, has been a wreck ever since, mourning his lost younger brother and eking out a living as a janitor at the local Indian casino. And then Lindstrom builds a fancy house on the inlet across from John's cabin. His wife happens to be the heiress of the shipping line whose ore carrier sank. John's resentment, and pain over his brother's death, only grow. And then he meets a man who's (obviously) got things on his mind other than finding personal peace—like, shaking things up, and maybe getting his hands on vast amounts of money.

In the midst of all this, Cork is treading a tender line as he reunites, after mutual extramarital affairs, with his wife, Jo, a lawyer who represents, among others, the local Natives. She gets drawn into the lumber mill explosion, and Cork tags along. Cork bumps up against a few eco-warriors, and wonders what their involvement in the incident might be. He can't seem to keep his nose out of all the goings-on. And as he is the former sheriff, the various authorities—current sheriff, FBI, the state version of the FBI, etc.—let him keep nosing around.

Then Jo and their son, Stevie, are kidnapped, along with the heiress and her son. It's about here, halfway through, that the book becomes, as they say, unputdownable. And there is where I'll stop with the summary. Even my summary so far is sketchy at best—though I bet you can guess who might be behind the kidnapping. It's a pretty good book, and the dénouement did surprise me (not that I consider it convincing, but heck, it's genre fiction, not real life). 

I think now that I'll be giving Krueger a rest for a while. Then again, I do find it hard to resist a good thriller, and the three so far qualify. We'll see. The next one's called Blood Hollow, so if I continue on my alphabetical pattern at the present pace, it'll be up in, oh, five months. But maybe I'll find something more compelling for B. It'll probably depend on how demanding A was . . . 

And now, on to Q! Which I thought I'd skip, but then, scanning my shelves for an R book, what should jump up and wave its arms but a book of short stories, The Question of Bruno. My decision has been made. (I do love this method of choosing what to read next. And if whatever book lands in my hands just doesn't engage me, onto the discard pile it goes, and off I go in search of an alternative. If Bruno proves unsatisfying, I will be skipping Q. But here's hoping.)

Book Report: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

7. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) (3/29/26)

On October 25, 2023, the journalist and writer Omar El Akkad wrote on X: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

He was writing about Gaza—and about the West, about privilege, about power structures and power plays. He was writing about death and destruction, about lives turned topsy-turvy. And to what end? What does all the killing actually accomplish? Isn't it, simply, abhorrent?

This book is an extension of that tweet.

In it, he provides many anecdotes, which I found easy enough to grasp—anecdotes about love, about confusion, about power, about yearnings, about life's meaning, also about atrocities. He also interrogates this world order, and I found his polemics harder to get a handle on. He has plenty to criticize, but I ended up—as so often in these circumstances—unsure just what we are to do about it all.

El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, is now a US citizen. From early on, he experienced the capriciousness of the world order as his father, who worked in the hotel business (think: capitalism, think: third world), tried to follow a career. He brings all those identities to bear here, in what is essentially a critique of western liberalism. 

Lord knows, we are living in a bizarre time when nothing much makes sense. Not Gaza. Not Trump. Not Ukraine. Now, not Iran. I read the news daily, and feel ever more alienated from what I've always thought of as "my country," of "the world." 

Maybe I need to read this book again, slower. Maybe I just need to accept that it will never make sense. That there's so much hatred in the world, so much desperate scrabbling for power.

Although as El Akkad reminds us at the end of his book, while atrocity is rampant, maybe the opposite is indeed stronger: kindness and love, caring and humanity. The final paragraph is this:

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air. 

But: Evil is never necessary. We don't ride around in carriages. There is no cliff. We can't fly. I mean, I get the sentiments, but I guess I'm just overwhelmed by the fact that there are too many of us, and we seem to be ever more at odds. And there is so much fear and hatred, cruelty and greed in the world. That, I don't get. But it's a fact. I would absolutely love it if, today, we could all agree that we've always been against... all the suffering, all the heartache, all the death, all the turmoil. But that doesn't seem to be the human condition. How strange, that we would choose such a state of being. How absolutely strange.

In the meantime, however, I vote, as I have done in every election for 52 years. It often feels meaningless: I live in California; my vote for president has 1/4 the weight of a vote in Wyoming thanks to the stinking electoral college. On Saturday I waved my flag with 10,000(!) others at our local No Kings protest. It feels so small. But it's something.

Sorry, I've not really covered much about this book. You have to read it yourself. Let me know what you think.

And now, after two O books in a row, it's on to P.

95. Essays, part II

The other day I shared a multi-part list of essays from Summer Brennan's Substack "A Writer's Notebook" and her weeklong "essay camp." Here are the rest of the essays she recommends.

Day 4

"Passing Mary Oliver at Dawn," by Summer Brennan, 764 words, 3-minute read
"A Woman's Work: Home Economics," by Carolita Johnson, 1,075 words, 5 minutes
"Natural Intelligence," by Maria Popova, 1,538 words, 6 minutes
"The Face That Replicates," by Katy Kelleher, 2,620 words, 10 minutes
"The Heaviest Pain in the World," by Rob Delaney, 4,240 words, 17 minutes
"Chicxulub," by T. Coraghessan Boyle (a short story), 4,374 words, 18 minutes
"Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations," by Leslie Jamison, 7,271 words, 29 minutes
"The Reenchanted World," by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 10,766 words, 43 minutes
"Ugly, Bitter, and True," by Suzanne Rivecca, about 16,000 words, 1 hour 10 minutes
"Bluets," by Maggie Nelson, about 28,000 words, 2 hours

Day 5

"A Word for Autumn," by A. A. Milne, 892 words, 4 minutes
"Living Like Weasels," by Annie Dillard, 1,585 words, 6 minutes
"On Self-Respect," by Joan Didion, 1,826 words, 7 minutes
"Uncanny the Winging That Comes from Certain Husks," by Joy Williams, 2,251 words, 9 minutes
"Scent Makes a Place," by Katy Kelleher, 2,700 words, 11 minutes
"Frog," by Anne Fadiman, 6,019 words, 24 minutes
"When I Met the Pope," by Patricia Lockwood, 6,604 words, 26 minutes
"Shipping Out, by David Foster Wallace, about 20,000 words, 1 hour 20 minutes

And that's it! Plenty of reading material, most of which I've never encountered. 

94. Louise Glück, poet

Witchgrass

Something

comes into the world unwelcome

calling disorder, disorder—

If you hate me so much

don’t bother to give me

a name: do you need

one more slur

in your language, another

way to blame

one tribe for everything—

as we both know,

if you worship

one god, you only need

One enemy—

I’m not the enemy.

Only a ruse to ignore

what you see happening

right here in this bed,

a little paradigm

of failure. One of your precious flowers

dies here almost every day

and you can’t rest until

you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever

happens to be sturdier

than your personal passion—

It was not meant

to last forever in the real world.

But why admit that, when you can go on

doing what you always do,

mourning and laying blame,

always the two together.

I don’t need your praise

to survive. I was here first,

before you were here, before

you ever planted a garden.

And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon

are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little.  And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure sea water.

93. Essays, part I

The other day an email appeared in my inbox heralding a weeklong event that I (sort of) participated in last year, and so I'm on the list for this year too, it seems. It's called "Essay Camp," and its on the Substack called "A Writer's Notebook" by Summer Brennan. The point being to write an essay over the next week. Simple, huh?

Yeah, sure.

Michel de Montaigne,
father of the essay

Summer writes this: "An essay is famously defined as 'an attempt.' That is the root of the word. It means to try—but try to do what? To understand, to clarify, to persuade, to compare, to connect, to remember, to preserve. An essay can be long or short, personal or impersonal. It can express a truth or explain a stance, introduce an idea or marry two seemingly unrelated ideas together. In that trying, the author’s thought process is often visible on the page. To write an essay is to reach for something, not so much to explain as to explore."

As so often, I take a look, and yes! these seem like wonderful exercises. And as so often, I then wander on to some other distraction, thinking maybe I'll just collect all six or however many days' worth and then—one day when my slate is as clean as can be—sit down and really apply myself. 

Seventy-plus years on this planet, and I still have no self-awareness!

Anyway, the reason I'm writing all this today is to catalog the "exemplary essays" that Summer mentions at the end of each day's assignment. Reading essays, she points out, is a critical exercise as we tiptoe into the murky waters that are our own lives and try to make sense of what we find.

This is part I, presenting the first three days of "Essay Camp." I'll tackle the second half in a future post. And apologies to Summer for stealing wholesale. If you're interested in her Substack, you can find it here.

On day 1, it was "some familiar classics that show variety in length, subject, and style." I've read many of these, but they are all worth a revisit:

"Tiny Beautiful Things," by Cheryl Strayed, 896 words, 4 minute read
"The Death of the Moth," by Virginia Woolf, 1,175 words, 5 minutes
"A Good Café on the Place St-Michel," from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, 1,639 words, 6 minutes
"Me Talk Pretty One Day," by David Sedaris, 1,847 words, 9 minutes
"Shooting an Elephant," by George Orwell, 3,283 words, 12 minutes
"Night Walks," by Charles Dickens, 3,788 words, 14 minutes
"Goodbye to All That," by Joan Didion, about 4,000 words, 18 minutes
"Total Eclipse," by Annie Dillard, 5,589 words, 22 minutes
"Notes on 'Camp,'" by Susan Sontag, about 6,000 wordes, 24 minutes
"Equal in Paris," by James Baldwin, 6,775 words, 28 minutes
"The Fourth State of Matter," by Jo Ann Beard, about 7,200 words, 30 minutes
"Consider the Lobster," by David Foster Wallace, about 7,500 words, 32 minutes

Day 2

"Ghost Story," by Maggie Smith, 618 words, 2.5 minutes
"The Smoker," by Ottessa Moshfegh, 1,098 words, 4 minutes
"The Invitation," by Barry Lopez, 1,758 words, 7 minutes
"Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant," from Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, 1,673 words, 7 minutes
"Kevin Brazil," by Kevin Brazil, 3,090 woreds, 12 minutes
"On Keeping a Notebook," by Joan Didion, 3,052 words, 12 minutes
"Joy," by Zadie Smith, 2,868 words, 12 minutes
"The Youth in Asia," by David Sedaris, 3,294 words, 13 minutes
"The Terror of Love," by Samantha Irby, 3,570 words, 13 minutes
"A Toast Story," by John Gravois, 3,838 words, 15 minutes
"Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life," by Yiyun Li, 3,948 words, 15 minutes
"The Curse," by Alexander Chee, 4,924 words, 20 minutes
"My Instagram," by Dayna Tortorici, 8,323 words, 33 minutes

Day 3

"Things That Appear Ugly or Troubling but upon Closer Inspection Are Beautiful," by Gretchen Legler, 468 words, 2 minutes
"Love Songs: I'm Your Man," by Laurie Stone, 722 words, 3 minutes
"The Negreeting," in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, 722 words, 3 minutes
"Rape Joke," by Patricia Lockwood, 1,266 words, 5 minutes
"An Almanac of Birds," by Maria Popova, 2,141 words, 8 minutes
"Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over," by Sabrina Orah Mark, 1,627 words, 8 minutes
"Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk," by Katy Kelleher, 2,053 words, 8 minutes
"Quitting," by John Phipps, 2,226 words, 9 minutes
"What the Black Woman Thinks about Women's Lib," by Toni Morrison, 3,878 words, 15 minutes
"One Four Two Five Old Sunset Trail," by Joy Williams, 3,936 words, 16 minutes
"Welcome to Dog World," by Blair Braverman, 7, 485 words, 30 minutes

Even if I have to cattle-prod myself to sit down and write essays, it's theoretically quite possible to sit down and read them, and so get some inspiration. 

Part II will follow when Summer has finished presenting this iteration of "Essay Camp."

Book Report: On Beauty

6. Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005) (3/24/26)

I enjoyed this book well enough. The writing itself is spectacular, and Smith has an amazing way with dialogue. She gives us all the trickiness of interpersonal relationships, whether that comes from the passage of time, differing philosophies of life, class and race disparities, or simply assumptions made. 

The story, which a NYT book review tells me is based loosely on E. M. Forster's Howards End (which I have not read), focuses on a family living in an upscale Boston neighborhood, where the father, 57-year-old Howard Belsey, is a tenureless art historian, white and British, who has recently cheated on his wife, Kiki, African-American and a nurse, less intellectual but certainly not stupid. They have three children, two in college, one still in high school but increasingly hanging out with some Haitian rights activists. Howard's rival, a Trinidadian scholar, comes to town, a visiting professor at Howard's Ivy League–ish college—they both study Rembrandt, drawing very different conclusions about his work, his intentions; and they occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum. This man, Monty, also has a wife and two children, all of whom are woven into the story. And there's a rapper who stumbles into this rarefied environment.

All of which are just some of the characters and details of a constantly shifting story of constantly shifting self-understandings and desires, of time passing and connections made and lost, of strivings and settlings and abandonments, of power plays and deep satisfactions and regrets. It's life.

When I say I enjoyed it "well enough," I'm not sure if I mean I wasn't quite in the mood for what amounts to a multiple-character study, that I would have appreciated a bit more of a plot, or a, I dunno, point? What I'm left with most is how accomplished the writing is, but the story itself is more like a kaleidoscope, giving me no fixed image. Except possibly the very end, where Howard is finally presenting his lecture that could, he hopes, win him tenure—only, in the confusion of reaching the venue late, he left his notes in the car. 

Howard pressed the red button again. A picture came up. He waited a minute and then pressed it once more. Another picture. He kept pressing. People appeared: angels and staalmeesters and merchants and surgeons and students and writers and peasants and kings and the artist himself. And the artist himself. And the artist himself. The man from Pomona began to nod appreciatively. Howard pressed the red button. He could hear Jack French saying to his eldest son, in his characteristically loud whisper: You see, Ralph, the order is meaningful. Howard pressed the red button. Nothing happened. He had come to the end of the line. He looked out and spotted Kiki, smiling into her lap. The rest of the audience were faintly frowning at the back wall. Howard turned his head and looked at the picture behind him.
     'Hendrickje Bathing, 1654,' croaked Howard and said no more.

     On the wall, a pretty, blousy Dutch woman in a simple white smock paddled in water up to her calves. Howard's audience looked at her and then at Howard and then at the woman once more, awaiting elucidation. The woman, for her part, looked away, coyly, into the water. She seemed to be considering whether to wade deeper. The surface of the water was dark, reflective—a cautious bather could not be certain of what lurked beneath. Howard looked at Kiki. In her face, his life. Kiki looked up suddenly at Howard—not, he thought, unkindly. Howard said nothing. Another silent minute passed. The audience began to mutter perplexedly. Howard made the picture larger on the wall as Smith had explained to him how to do. The woman's fleshiness filled the wall. He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt's love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, painted heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety—chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come.

That's how the book ends: the final paragraphs. (It doesn't spoil anything—well, nothing important—to quote it.) It reminds me of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I likewise made my way through enjoying the writing but not quite sure what it all added up to—until the final page, which knocked me out it was so exquisite. This rich book might also transform in my mind from "good enough" to eternally memorable. I guess time will tell.

92. Toes

We took a walk this afternoon at one of our favorite dog-walk spots—only today, no dog. (Sad.) As we made our way back to the car we were walking on sandy trails, and I noticed some one-toed footprints. Horses. Which got us wondering what other one-toed beasts there are. 

Wikipedia to the rescue:

Horses, asses, and zebras, also rhinoceroses, also tapirs—three families, comprising 17 species—all belong to the order of ungulates known as Perissodactyla, meaning odd-toed. Meaning that these animals have reduced the weight-bearing toes to three or one of the original five. (Though tapirs have four toes in front, three in back, so they're a bit of an anomaly.)

The other order of (mostly) ungulates is the Artiodactyla, representing 270 species. Think pigs, peccaries, hippopotamuses, antelopes, deer, giraffes, camels, llamas, alpacas, sheep, goats, and cattle. Even the Cetaceae—dolphins and other toothed whales, baleen whales too (this blows my mind)—are sometimes placed in the Artiodactyla order of Euungulata. They don't even have toes! But they are closely related to hippos. Who knew.

Humans, may I remind you, are in the order Primates, 500 species strong. Our toes don't figure into that categorization. And the rest of the mammals? There are over 20 orders in all:
rodentia (representing 40% of all mammal species)
chiroptera (bats)
insectivores (moles, shrews, hedgehogs)
carnivora (dogs, cats, bears, raccoons, skunks, mongooses, weasels, and more)
lagomorphs (rabbits, hares, pikas)
proboscids (elephants)
pilosa (anteaters and sloths)
cingulata (armadillos)
sirenia (dugongs and manatees)
the marsupials: kangaroos, koalas, and wombats; opossums; bandicoots (three orders)
monotremes (platypus and echidnas)
and don't forget the pangolins, aardvarks, flying lemurs, and tree and elephant shrews

Sometimes I find it easier to try to puzzle out these various connections of our natural world than to try to make sense of human . . . what word do I want here? bullshit, malarkey, tragedy, stupidity, hubris, sad sad sad sadness. 

Maybe it's more convenient to parse a Grèvys zebra from a plains zebra, a chimpanzee from a bonobo. But shouldn't we be figuring out how to live human with human? 

91. Billionaires

I am (this is, I anticipate, going to be a bit of a disjointed rant) beside myself at the injustices of this country, this world, and the inequities, and the selfishness. Capitalism: I spit on it. It's just the new brand of feudalism—a few at the top, the rest of us below, getting stomped on. 

Not that I, personally, am getting stomped on—but my needs are modest. I managed to get born in an in-between moment when it was looking good for a middle class, when the rich weren't especially filthy. My husband worked a good job, and we managed to save up some. 

But what about the various Gens—X, Millennial, Z, Alpha, and now Beta: I see a lot of worrying about their futures. Justifiably, maybe. I don't know how you can actually make a career out of being an "influencer." But some seem to manage it. And hopefully real jobs will stay around. But then again: AI.

Though the poor—there's never been a time without destitution. No matter the generation. Capitalism makes it hard to get anywhere. You've got to have serious breaks. Heaven forbid the government could help individuals find a decent life.

Anyway, yeah: tonight I got to thinking about all those billionaires. Careless, uncaring. What CAN they do with all that money? I honestly don't have a clue. How many yachts, helicopters, or private jets, never mind "homes," can one own?

As of March 2026, so Google AI tells me, there are 3,428 billionaires in the world, 989 in the U.S., followed next by China and India. There's a new billionaire every day, apparently. Altogether, these people (481 of whom are women) have a combined wealth of $20.1 trillion. 

As Google AI again tells me, "a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) is visually represented as a massive, 100-level-high structure of $100-note pallets covering a football field twice, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty. It is 10,000 stacks of $100 million crates, enough to dwarf a human, making them look like an ant."

A mere billion dollars, meanwhile, "is best visualized as a 34-foot high cube of $100 bills, or in $1 bills would reach 67 miles high . . . and would take 274 years to spend at a rate of $10,000 per day."

And here I'm feeling extravagant for booking a $250-a-night hotel for a week in Berlin in June? (And yeah, it does feel extravagant.)

You can find the top ten industries for billionaires, and the richest individuals in each, here. (Though that article is from two years ago, so who knows what the shake-down is now.)

Meanwhile, I get incensed by footballers and actors and musicians getting paid tens of millions of dollars for their—I want to put "work" in quotation marks, but sure, they are working. It might not be improving the future of humanity, but it's work. And in the case of movie actors and musicians, I eat it up, so what I am complaining about? 

I also know actors who make nothing, but who do the work because they love it. I have many musician friends who go out every week and perform at a local venue, with a dedicated coterie of fans, and still they are struggling to make ends meet.

Some actors and musicians and footballers get lucky, and good for them. 

But these billionaires? Who seem to be taking over the U.S. government? What are they actually doing?

I don't have a particular point here. Except that the world has shifted dramatically from what I grew up expecting. And I don't like it.

And a big part of me says I should stop listening to/reading the news. Wouldn't that be nice?

90. Project 365

I posted this a while back on FB, but I'll post it here too, for posterity. Here's what I wrote on FB:

Almost 18 years ago, I completed my first photo-a-day project (Project 365), which I posted daily on Flickr. Back in December, I started my fifth such project—after a gap of 13 years. Here it is so far, 88 days in. It's simple enough: take a photo every day, and post it, with a bit of explanation of why or what. I find it a fascinating (I guess I'm easily fascinated!) record of the mostly tiny moments that make up my days, my life.

Since then, a couple of weeks have passed. And yes, more pictures! 

I'm up to day 107 now—almost a third of the way along. Some days I completely forget to take a picture—days when I'm busy at home, with a work project usually (currently: editing a book about an early woman lawyer)—and then have to find something, anything, in my immediate surroundings to document (a cat, for example; cats are easy targets). 

It's strange and lovely to go back, even all the way back to 2008 and the first Project 365, and remember that very moment, where I was, what I was struck by to take that shot. I do sometimes wish I were better at embracing moments without the aid of a photograph. But I'm also glad I have all these photos to remind me of the wealth of my experience.

Here are the photos I've taken the last seven days, complete with their Flickr captions:

Trail closed. But that doesn’t stop us,
outlaws that we are. Or judging from the
well-defined groove in the grass, others either.

Morning light on shells. This sight made me happy
this morning as I started one of two poetry
Zooms for today. Sometimes it’s the little things…

New books. I'm not much into shopping (just take a look
at my closet)—except when it comes to books. The subtlest
recommendation, and I'm off to the internet putting in an order.
These books arrived yesterday and today. The one on the bottom
was a freebie (two copies, actually): a gorgeous book about
the photographer Edward Steichen and his delphiniums, which
I was fortunate enough to proofread for the Eastman Museum
in Rochester, NY, for an upcoming exhibition. The next one up
is a book of poetry, by a poet I admire. The one above is
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), writing about the vanishing of his
world—recommended by a guest on Ezra Klein's podcast, for its
present-day pertinence. I certainly do feel like the world I've
always relied on has vanished. Americanah is a novel my SIL
said she loved. And I'm not exactly sure where I heard about
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (it's about
Gaza), but it sounded important. Winner of prizes, but the very title
is so provocative. So yeah: I do shop. Bur pretty much only for books.
And groceries. Gotta eat.

Oh Canada. This guy was very calm—though he never
took that eye off me as I made my way past on my afternoon walk.

Morro Bay. Spent the day visiting friends in Morro Bay and Cambria.
I always enjoy spending time in this corner of the California coast.
It feels quieter and more secluded than our own corner.
We started our visit with a walk at Cloisters Beach. 

Pinnacles High Peaks. Three of us went for an 8.5-mile hike
today at Pinnacles National Park. The forecast was for
90-degree heat in the afternoon, so we got going from our house
at 6:30, arriving at 7:30. It was delightfully cool as we set out,
and although it did grow gradually warmer during the course
of the morning (we finished up around 12:30), we were perfectly
comfortable. We saw many wildflowers, some chipmunks and squirrels,
many turkey vultures (though the condors remained tucked away
waiting for afternoon thermals), and the best: a foot-long southwestern
pond turtle in a small stream; a beautifully patterned frog, in the same
stream; and a western rattlesnake stretched across the trail. Several women
were taking a big detour (into the stream) to avoid it, but we figured,
what? it's not coiled, it's just enjoying the sun—no problem.
So we marched right past it, and sure enough, although it flicked its tongue
at us (tasting us), it didn't seem to care one whit. I bet that sun on its
long body felt sooooooo good! 

Great egret. A frog pond visitor. From the
sound of the frogs singing in the evenings, s/he
is probably finding plenty to snack on.

89. Ross Gay and Gwendolyn Brooks, poets

Yesterday on FB I ran into a poem by Ross Gay, a sparkle of a man whose writing I enjoy so much. 

Sorrow Is Not My Name

                    —after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks
at the market. Think of that. The long night,
the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me
on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field
calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel
and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

                    —for Walter Aikens

Well, that just got me curious about the epigraph: "after Gwendolyn Brooks." Fortunately, others have gotten curious too, and I quickly found an essay in the Paris Review that unlocks the secret. In it, the author references the poem that Gay was responding to:

To The Young Who Want To Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here—through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

I have had less luck learning who Walter Aikens is. A young friend of Gay's, perhaps, who was battling his own sorrows. No telling, and not important—except for the connection that the two of them had (the poem was published in 2011) and hopefully still have. 

88. Death

The past two days I've kept running into death. 

In a sense, lately, death is all around me—in the continued (eternal) absence of our Milo. No more early morning walk, no more breakfast to be portioned out (kibble + a few spoonfuls of canned food), no more exuberant greeting when we arrive home from running errands, no more afternoon walk, no more tossing of the increasingly vanishing dog toy (his last two, a llama and a red panda, remain rather sadly intact), no more sticks thrown, no more river swims, no more evening meal (which increasingly became whatever he would eat, chiefly roast chicken, and salmon skin when we had salmon for dinner, and freeze-dried duck), no more neck scritches, no more sigh-and-thump as he settled onto his bed by ours. No more forbidden licking of my toes. 

But we've got his little shrine—his ashes-containing box, his consolement cards, his pawprint pendants, his fur—to which I've added a calendar I made, for 2012, of his first year, and I rotate the pages every so often. Little Milo flying along a path! Milo standing tall at Sonora Pass! Milo chewing on his chew toys! Milo at SEATAC on his way to his new home! I intend to make a little book from some of the many, many photos I took of him over the years. He was my muse, my joy.

As a friend commented the other day after attending the memorial service for a good friend of hers, "And of course, the unsolved question of what happens to dead people, where are they, where do they go? They seem to suddenly just disappear." Same goes for dogs. 

Cats too. We'll be finding out with our two, but hopefully not too soon. That said, I have lost cats—four of them—but only one of those did we "put to sleep." That cat, the empress Tisiphone, I cried buckets over. But that was thirty years ago. The pain has dulled to fond remembrance. (The other three disappeared in the neighborhood. We found the remains of one—the victim of a coyote. I know: we should keep them indoors. I won't argue my case for not doing that here...)

So, the past two days:

On Sunday, my writing group received word that our leader couldn't attend our Monday meeting because her partner was in the hospital, so we were postponing for a week. Yesterday (Monday) evening, she wrote that he had died, at 10:10 p.m. (There is something so poignant about that precise time.) This evening she wrote that we will still meet next week, that "I am in shock but still walking around." 

That's the strangeness of it, isn't it? You still walk around. You have to: go to the bathroom, pour a glass of water, make your way to a chair in the sunshine where you cry, eat some food. Somehow, you take yourself to the store and buy groceries (I'd probably go straight to the Ben & Jerry's freezer). You keep going. You just do.

Today, I read on FB of two more deaths: my Antioch U friend Consuelo's kitty Bear Boy, and the longtime companion of the mother of another Antioch friend, Monique. It was moving to me to read their tributes to these important beings in their lives.

Then there's Country Joe McDonald, whose "Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" was so pertinent then, and seems just as pertinent now. He died on March 7, age 84.

And today my friend Nina's computer died! She's getting a new, modern, much lighter one, and fortunately she had backed up the more important files. But still: even transitioning to a new laptop requires adjustment. Death is never easy.

But the biggest death these past few days happened just a few hours ago: my Howler friend Sherilyn's father, Ron, who suffered a serious stroke nine years ago, finally slipped to the other side. All these nine years, three of us—Sherilyn, Kim, and I—have met pretty much every morning (travel aside) to spend ninety minutes writing or in other creative pursuits (and pretty much all day on weekends). This evening at 6:06 she texted: "Ron has died. He passed away comfortably in his sleep about 15 minutes ago. Thank you for supporting us."

It's strange how in the chest that simple statement hit me. All these years, Sherilyn has been flying back and forth every week between Burbank, where she and her husband, Grant, live, and Santa Clara, where Ron and her mom, Cindy, live, to take care of him. There were caregivers early on, but then the pandemic hit and caregiving became a two-person gig. Though it was mainly Sherilyn on watch. Grant would come up every so often to help out. It was a small, but twenty-four-hour, operation, keeping Ron going.

And now he's gone. 

Just this last week, they signed up with hospice. Ron stopped eating several weeks ago; it was but a matter of time. And hospice seemed to spark Cindy into action, making plans. She announced, for example, that she'll be selling the house and moving back to Hawaii, where she's from. She started going through Ron's shirts. Hospice seemed to provide an opening, a new horizon.

And now he's gone. And the new horizon can swim more clearly into view.

I'm excited for Sherilyn, and for Cindy. Sad too, of course, but Ron really went away with that stroke. 

I asked Sherilyn if she'd send a picture of Ron, because I'd never seen one. I had this vague image of a man lying in bed, a big man, an Asian American man, but I didn't really know what he looked like. She sent this:

Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas, 12/2014—a couple of years before the stroke. "We have tons but the fastest search was 'Las Vegas,'" she wrote. "He loved Vegas! Proof he's from Hawaii!"

He looked like a big happy bear of a man. I'm so sorry he spent his last almost ten years living the diminished life he did. 

I trust Sherilyn and Cindy won't mind that I featured them here. It's just so strange for the death of someone I never even knew to hit me so hard. But in a way, I've lived with the three of them for nine years now. Their story, what little I know of it, is in my own heart.

And I will finish with something my cousin Kris wrote (on FB), in response to this post:

My feelings on death swing… a pendulum, accepting it as the course of all things. An order, a relief, the completion of the wondrous circle... then the arc unfolds personal emptiness and loss. I sit in sadness. Heavy. The weight makes it hard to breathe. And hard not to. Gradually the feelings file into a stack. Sleep seems to help the stack and breathing. Laughter always helps when it's organic. Best to go outside where the world's bigger. Breathing is easier and you see the light and souls in life...