grey rain falls sideways
andante mderato
we do our taxes
. . . . .
Category: Uncategorized
What’s an insecure sentence?
Agent: Your sentences are insecure.
Me: As am I.
Agent: Well you look like a confident person.
Me: A foot taller than him, with my boots on.
I shrugged.
What I should have said: Never trust a fiction writer.
. . . . .
a jewish vibe
At dinner the other night a woman told me that she didn’t get a jewish vibe off of me. What’s a jewish vibe? Discussion ensued. Someone at the table described someone else who wasn’t at the table as jew-lite. After a while I said: I’m not lite anything. I’m a downloaded crack copy, that’s what kind of jew I am.
. . . . .
not so bright
It’s bright outside, and getting warm.
I am not so bright, and stuck indoors.
. . . . .
the second black out
Only headlights light Saint-Urbain Street this rush hour.
The power is out at dinnertime for the second time this week.
The leeks are soaking in their sauté oil, cold, on the electric stove.
At least I can’t see the potatoes turning brown in the dusk-kitchen.
I’m on a dial-up, so I could still get on-line on my laptop.
But we can’t watch the video we rented for the evening.
We can’t rent DVDs because our television is too old.
Even my umbrella got busted in the wind on the way home.
I think technology is slipping backwards, just a little bit.
. . . . .
there’s a cross on that hill
Once I had a friend visiting me in Montréal and she said:
There’s a cross on that hill! And in unison we all said:
It’s not a hill, it’s a mountain!! Our mountain is a good landmark.
If you’re downtown, the mountain is north, see what I mean?
In Rome, San Pietro works the same way. If someone asked me:
Where do you live? I’d say: Head toward San Pietro and turn right.
Years ago they added coloured lights to the cross on Mount Royal,
so that when the Pope died, we’d all know it. When I lived in Rome,
I thought: Please don’t let the Pope die while I’m here.
My apartment was right behind the Vatican, very close to his.
During the April Fools’ Day comedy special on the radio,
they kept us up to date on the failing health of the Pope.
Then he died during a literary festival, during a rainstorm.
CNN was on in the hotel lobby, but I have yet to see
if the lights have changed on the cross on the mountain.
. . . . .
enough already
It never rains
but it pours
vodka and falls
down drunk.
. . . . .
Reading Sharon Olds
The Eye
My bad grandfather wouldn’t feed us.
He turned the lights out when we tried to read.
He sat alone in the invisible room
in front of the hearth, and drank. He died
when I was seven, and Grandma had never once
taken anyone’s side against him,
the firelight on his red cold face
reflecting extra on his glass eye.
Today I thought about that glass eye,
and how at night in the big double bed
he slept facing his wife, and how the limp
hole, where his eye had been, was open
towards her on the pillow, and how I am
one-fourth him, a brutal man with a
hole for an eye, and one-fourth her,
a woman who protected no one. I am their
sex, too, their son, their bed, and
under their bed the trap-door to the
cellar, with its barrels of fresh apples, and
somewhere in me too is the path
down to the creek gleaming in the dark, a
way out of there.
Sharon Olds, from The Dead and the Living
. . . . .
sunny, but wind
Now it’s sun on the face.
Now it’s wind in the ear.
Cold going, walking in the shade,
sweating by the time I get anywhere.
. . . . .
first spring rain
The first spring rain hangs in the air
grey as dog hair floating the hallway.
In the park, the ice is ruined,
like smashed honeydew rinds.
. . . . .