Togetherness and banishment,
wife and I smoldering on the living room couch,
our tiny continent.
Pandemic Diary Excerpts
March 21, 2023
By Webmaster
Poet and Painter
March 21, 2023
By Webmaster
Togetherness and banishment,
wife and I smoldering on the living room couch,
our tiny continent.
March 21, 2023
By Webmaster
A New York friend says
we have no real seasons in the
Coachella Valley.
Untrue.
Come fall, the death of summer, and we feel like feathers.
Birds prance like runway models on the telephone wires,
leaves toss in the twilight wind.
July 5, 2021
By Webmaster
Do I have any pets?
“I’ve been wanting to get a dog. I’m kind of an old soul,
and I think dogs also tend to be old souls.”
Psychobabble to convey depth—
I don’t like dogs.
July 5, 2021
By Webmaster
She walked behind me at first, then alongside. When I reached home, she simply walked in, sat down, and immediately fell asleep. She woke, as if at the end of a long illness. We ate grilled fish and sat together in silence. She spent the night and the following day, which turned into another, and soon a week had passed. We got along. She came and went as she pleased.
July 5, 2019
By Peter
My big brother Harry was something: Leave the crude undamaged beneath the sea, he said, sold his car, and even refused for a time to ride in cars. (Later, he lived in a car.) Immediately after college, Harry changed his name to Harrison Redwood, moved north, and chained himself to an old growth redwood.
July 5, 2019
By Peter
At first blush, it appears an unambiguous portrait, the subject a man in meditation— adamantly upright posture, well-cut jacket, background in soft focus. From another angle, one sees a woman with a broad, strong face and red hair. Viewed from a third angle, the subject is a beast,
July 5, 2019
By Peter
We dreamed of a life of pâté en croute,
always arriving with a fig mostarda,
a life in which a contralto-green cilantro pesto
could be counted on to refresh the gamey lamb.
Why should the search for perfect cheese puffs be less important
than the search for pure black or the sound of one hand?
July 5, 2019
By Peter
We’ll watch black and white movies exclusively.
I will not be fat.
There will be acoustic guitar.
It will be feng shui.
I will not smoke indoors.
I promise I’ll stop doing that thing you hate.
Also, the other thing.
July 5, 2019
By Peter
I want to have you, I murmur to the photograph in an airport of a tree on a ridge, its frail silver gelatin silhouette leaning against a bright sky. The shadow hovering at the edge of the frame must be me.
July 5, 2019
By Peter
I believed I knew the contents of the firing chamber, knew the sear surface and hammer materials, until one day at the zoo, as I leaned on a railing watching the gibbons balletic, I saw in the acrylic panel enclosing the cage my own reflection, an unarticulated skeleton in a specimen jar. As snow fell …
March 7, 2017
By Peter
I saw Mick Jagger once with his girlfriend at a café two tables away from where my mother and I were eating lunch. “Mick Jagger!” I blurted under my breath, as if I’d just arrived from the sea floor. My mother was eating a wedge of cantaloupe in her manner— first, the silver knife under …
November 28, 2016
By Peter
It was my father’s father who at last came to dinner from far away, gulped a whiskey, grinned, and said When I have a whiskey, I feel like I’m a new man & then the new man wants one, too my father pouring another & the new, new man also wanting a whiskey who tucked …
November 27, 2016
By Peter
Einstein at the Sink — Let us imagine a raven flying through the air . . .~Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Einstein stands at the sink, Trims his moustache, imagining The mirror is a window in a traincar. He snips the tip of a moustache hair And watches it drop like …
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WALLACE DESIGN | Cover image: Martinique by Andre Kertesz