I wanted a shirtless lifeguard
at the waterpark to see me, so I leapt
from the flotilla of plastic innertubes
into the waist-deep canal, where spotlit
mummies craned animatronic necks.
He came. He rustled, furious,
from a plastic hedge and banned
me from the Lost River of the
Pharaohs for life.
-Hannah Faith Notess
They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here,
Their very memory is fair and bright,
and my sad thoughts doth clear.
–Henry Vaugham, 1650
This poem is in memory my friend, the talented artist Diane Bauer.
Who hath desired the Sea? -the sight of salt water unbounded-
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, formless, enormous and growing-
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurrican blowing —
–Rudyard Kipling
Eulogy for the Costa Rican Ghosts
Knocking bamboo ushers in their moans.
Neither missing nor white,
they wonder who you are and what you are doing
and why life has left them and spared you –
imperfect as you are.
I feel their aching in the night air
their souls shaking in the tropical trees.
I remember their presence here
and bear them closer as time goes by…
my years stealing to inevitable death.
–Eileen Kennedy
When the black vastness overtakes us,
we stand in the tracks of shepherds
whose words on such nights
connected cold lights to form
the winged horse and flame-born bird
and the twins that led them forward.
But to speak the astral truths,
to see our names consumed
in unquenchable heat,
to fuse with unsayable source
shooting across the skies,
straight through the holes in our eyes.
–Donald Levering
When the black vastness overtakes us,
we stand in the tracks of shepherds
whose words on such nights
connected cold lights to form
the winged horse and flame-born bird
and the twins that led them forward.
But to speak the astral truths,
to see our names consumed
in unquenchable heat,
to fuse with unsayable source
shooting across the skies,
straight through the holes in our eyes.
–Donald Levering
The stars now die in the morning sky
And lose their glimmer one by one
The mountain peaks at down
The morning light turns back the night
The showers beauty on this tropic place
–William Brown
Costa Rica
In this world of wonder where I reside
Mountains soar to caress the azure sky
Forests surge from lowland to mountain side
And rivers of gold flow to silver seas
The gentle land to glorify
“Honey,
musn’t be blue.
It’s not so much do what you like
as it is that you like what you do.”
–James Lapine
Sunday in the Park with George
“Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village, or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante’s Purgatory.) It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” –Thornton Wilder
