Cricket story

Late last night I sat my butt down in my parents' bathroom and found myself face to face with a sizeable black insect with very long antennae. At first I was a little creeped out, then I realized it was probably a cricket. I put a cup down over it and it hopped up and down inside the cup then stopped. I found a piece of paper and slipped it under the cup, then escorted it outside.

I remember a kid's story I read when I was little about a Chinese kid who keeps a cricket in a cage. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

9:47:11 PM      trackback [] 

Strands

New Hampshire Seacoast, June 2004.

Strands

 

I.

 

My mother weaves my strands

into tapestries, telenovelas.

They make more sense

than my loose ends

of friends and lovers

she’s never met.

 

The woman he loved lived

with someone, then they split

and now he’s seeing her again

and you?

And your friend’s husband –

didn’t you say he wants her back

now the dog’s dead?

 

She should have been a novelist

I tell her

and she laughs.

 

 

II.

 

She gets everything wrong

my father barks at her.

He may as well chide her for sneezing,

deride her decision to cough.

He gripes to me –

We drive along the seashore,

same route every day, and

every day she says the same thing:

It’s so beautiful here, look at that

ocean, look how blue and that sky –

It’s so beautiful here, so beautiful.

Such a burden.

 

 

III.

 

A memory:

my brother between them

wading in belly high

into the bloodless fray.

Not me. I am in my room,

praying.

IV.

 

My parents spend their last years

along the shore seeing every day

sea and sky, salt marshes,

swans and gulls

so beautiful.

 

Today I walk the wide strand

that glistens so the vast sky slides

beneath me as I sail over the clouds.

I want to fly and keep on flying.

 

On the beach, two parents stand unmindful

as their children float untethered

among the clouds. One child

digs a giant mud hole in the sky,

and then all is lost –

a curtain of churning surf

draws across the sand.

9:07:29 PM      trackback [] 

On the waterfront

The view from our table last night at The Old Ferry Landing in Portsmouth, NH, a favorite of mine from way back:

5:36:14 PM      trackback []