Category: Little Epiphanies

She said, “My life is a slow poem that has lasted years.” I nodded but the gesture was lost over the telephone line. I thought, There are poems of words and poems of acts. Our lives are longish poems of acts. Silently but irrevocably, without our knowing how, the isolated acts of our lives are…

I stood alone – Don’t we all? – Waiting for you to touch me I wandered alone Down endless aisles Yearning for a destiny, any destiny I whispered alone In a vacant chamber Longing to hear someone sing I dreamed alone Conjuring lovers Whose bodies dissolved in the night I woke alone My body wrecked…

I received several letters this week addressed to my harmonica. It seems the recent account of our adventures together (“Travels with Harmonica”) had the unintended effect of thrusting him from my pocket out into the limelight. An unusually shy and private instrument, he nonetheless authorized me to tell the story of our meeting and how…

The first time I stuck a harmonica in my pocket and headed for the open road, I was twenty-two. I hitchhiked from Oakland to New Orleans. It was the start of a long list of harmonica-inspired voyages which featured me chasing the perfume of poetry and sin across the globe. I was raised on hobos…

Looking back, I find it strange – and charming – that I always thought I could be as eccentric as I chose and still belong. In junior high school, like everyone else in my hometown, I would go to the Friday Night Football games. But to make it more substantive, I would take War and…

I write to you summoning all the reservoirs of honesty I can gather. (Sometimes, I confess, they are not much.) Honesty for me is not something willful or controlled. The greatest lies are those we tell when the truth is something we cannot even pronounce in silence. As a friend once told me, “I do…

Standing in the midst of a crumbling world, I hear rubble and broken glass. The world is cracking right down its very midriff like a great sheet of arctic ice. A cold gash splits everything in two. You from me. My life from my body. Our dreams from the reality we reside in. But still…

While dancing Friday night at the La Marshall milonga I was besieged by happiness. It was a full frontal assault armed with boiling elixirs. They surprised me, disarmed me and over-powered me mid-dance. I gave up without a fight. This sequence of events is common to me and, I think, most dancers. You see it…

I write softly so that you can hear me. This is between you and me. We are alone. In the almost silence, worlds step out from their place of hiding. Rivers spring forth in the sand. Mountains heave themselves out of flatness. There, in the quiet of a new-formed world, we stand alone, face-to-face, you…