Gustave Flaubert

On a whim I picked up Madame Bovary, thinking it was going to be a chore. It wasn't. Flaubert is a true writer's writer. Amazing. A real live 'dead novelist.' Not stuffy, but pretty, accurate, lyrical, patient. Sentimental Education is just as good. Ah, to live in Paris. Anyone who likes literature, READ Flaubert. To compare, he's similar to Proust, but less verbose and windy. Flaubert is flawless.

Fragments of a Writer

I'm good at hating what I once loved,
or forgetting what I was before I once loved.
I'm good at leaving things
behind, unfinished, rotting
inside-out like dead wood.

Slowly, things take shape,
come together like mysteries
where the obvious one is guilty all along.

I'm good at being alone, humorless.


Small Towns

Before going into town, a small town, I stop at a pond I used to fish in the spring when I lived in this town. To get there you go by foot. Underneath the concrete bridge laden with bathroom-wall-markings. The sound of snow melting, and cars passing overhead. Through dead willows capped with snow, and parallel to the dark, green, running river. You'll pass a discarded, rusted dishwasher. Branches, heavy with snow, will snap. The sky cool and clear. Gusts of wind will lightly blow snow off the branches. Through the trees, and to the left, you'll see the pond. Still, reflected gray. All is silent. Imagine sleeping, but being awake. Only, if you wished, you could stay here forever in this wintered silence.



The lust that was there
still lingers
like a break in the weather--
a warm day in December.

She was my world,
she was my secondary world.

It all ended on a park bench
(the snap-back-on-of-a-bra),
when it began in a different time zone,
with different weather,
in a different season.

As a writer, I will never stop recollecting my life.

How things can fictionally intersect.
How I can recreate it,
build it to my liking.

Flawless, through the eyes of an artist, is this good season.

The lust that was there
takes me away
from what is not here anymore.

This dead December
it aches like a good thing,
all color gone.
Only browns and greens.

All the leaves from all the trees have let go
like the people in my life.

Now, like an afternoon fishing,
I remember when they held on so tight,
but I do not remember.
The river is frozen,
and my fishing pole hung up.

I sit in a lawn chair
on the bank of the river,
but the chair is empty--
no one is there.
The trees are bare,
and the river is frozen,
and my fishing pole hung up,
and the white chair is empty.
All the leaves from all the trees have let go
like the people in my life.
They say: "We will see."
They think: "The year has been a disaster. One bad season after another."

And it has been.
But, just in time, I turned it around.

And they say
nothing,
because the chair they look at on the bank of the river
is empty now, finally.
The boy who once fished there has retired.
Still, there is a break in the weather.
The river is thawing.
However,
a storm is on the way, they say.
But today, it is warm,
and the frozen river is thawing.
and a fire is going in the hearth.

They wait
for the chair to be occupied once again.

Sometimes you feel like an elf

. . . And I did, finding myself packing cookies on an assembly line to Christmas music while it snowed outside. Anyway. . .

Angle-Less

All is silent.
Warm air comes out of
the vents of my car.
Snow comes down on everything.
They have me working in a warehouse,
boxing cookies,
off Industrial Center Blvd.,
where only warehouses exist.
Masses of warehouses and parking lots.
Sparse space here.
This parking lot empty, everyone gone to lunch.
My car at the end,
then a stray field, then a highway.
In the field are stacks of skids, hundreds,
covered in blue tarp, torn, flapping
in the wind and snow
among this field in the night.

Lately, others have been
light bulbs in the night,
beacons offering places to stay,
money, or food.

Kindness.

In the distance, small lights glide
on the highway.
Snow falls on
and around my car.

I doze off for some time thinking of kindness,
how it covers all angles,
angle-less, spreading like light in the dark.