When Bach was a Busker in Brandenburg When Bach was a busker playing for humble coin he’d set up his organ in the middle of a square regardless of pigeons, ignoring the squirrels who sat poised at its edges waiting for their daily bread. He’d set to work assembling its pipes from a scaffold of arpeggios…

“What the earliest scriptural-literary texts do is attempt to find a language to come to terms with the contingency of being.” —Amit Chaudhuri; Storytelling & Forgetfullness ________________________________________ A Skeptic on Stories of Whoknowswhat? A story’s a trip through landscapes of malleable things, or characters bent by other characters, shoehorned into imaginations or pulled as a potter…

“We have from the beginning of the Holocene, you know, the raising, the creation of cities in the Tigris/Euphrates, we have created a world in which we marginalize that which we don’t think serves us as well as it could. We’ve turned nature into a thing.” ……………………………………—Barry Lopez, author, moral philosopher Death of 832 —for…

Snow Mountain The place is cool and distant, the air is clear of error, the vista wide and brimming. Everything is still, undone. Jim Culleny, 1974 Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Somewhere along the line I developed this thing about Ekphrastic poetry, exploring in word what a visual artist might have intended when he or she created their expressions, their work, their vision of understanding that invited me to look, to see, and think—— …………………………………………   . As if About A Painting It takes many steps to…

Walk through the architecture of memory which spaces are rooms of moments that define the layout of now. ……………………………………  —Roshi Bob The Architecture of Memory every room has its story— the back of the house is darkest but light floods the porch where we sit after a long day rising now and then from its steps,…

I am Hawk I ride a thermal, wind-lifted under sun which I think must be eternal, I fly! I’m on my breakfast glide, I am beauty, but infernal to who in open fields might run I’m soaring on the wind I’m searching like a drone I’m laser-eyed, I hunger. You watch me glide alone in…

American New Year 2026 Just because the old year has drifted out of sight because —well, time is like that, ……………………… doesn’t mean it’s disappeared, any more than a rush of unbound river rolling over dams assures that it is safely past and gone. It should be clear —as long as gravity does its thing,…

A Simple Ontology maybe flower petals are held to stems by thought and the wind’s a counter-thought that plucks and sets them elsewhere in the grass to grow in contemplative resolution beside the notion of a grub-pulling crow maybe the wind itself’s a palpable bright idea, something about motion and the abhorrence of vacuums something about coming and going,…

Two Hands First time I saw Escher’s two hands drawing themselves I thought, how cool this picture is in its absurd beauty, then much later, as in now, it comes to me as I give my cognition another chance, another shot at understanding, more clout in the process of perception, I think, this is a…

Until the Night Drops Fog lifting off of the river Frogs in a chorus of croaks Moon lit up —just a sliver A fire that the unknown has stoked Chuck Berry singing Johnny be Good his guitar lighting fires in our heads greenhorns working out would-could-should fresh ones a sunbeam had fed Look at how she climbs Look…

—on a painting by Edward Hopper Pegasus A flying red horse was a sign of my time. On drives anywhere along a center white line with mom and dad, when we rolled in to fill-her-up I’d see him there through my backseat window as on my couch-like seat I laid supine, and there he’d be,…

“The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely covered by oceans, but to link two amino acids together to make a protein, you have to remove water.” And that would have been impossible if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—literally a beachhead—to get started.” —geobiologist, Joseph…

If you talk about it, it’s not the Tao If you name it, it’s something else What can’t be named is eternal Naming splits the eternal to smithereens ……………… —Lao Tzu (sort of), 6th Century BC Lao Tzu’s Lament at first I think, I’ve got it! then I think, Ah no, that’s not it I…

Approaching the Cold Solstice with J. Kepler we’re falling deeply in —in as deeply as we get before we spin again along an ellipse’s rim to a more congenial spot for blood and breath what the astronomical survival odds (our outer limits) are, who knows? but time is short by late report listening now to ersatz…

Rear View In reflection, the world’s not just a shifty place, but odd really, the unexpectedness of it, it’s sudden winds & wild humans shifting as I’ve aged, sliding from simply familiar to things with torn edges, never fully knowable, open-ended, dangerous, yet held together tentatively by threads of love and unexpected revelations of beauty…

Brevity I need a good poem lifespan-short, one I can shoe-horn between instants which in that pinch says so much I’ll understand long and short by the depth of calluses built upon my brain— but it’s not happening I’m already up to nine lines so it’s too late for brevity— what I want is one…

Cast your bread on the waters: for you shall find it after many days. …………………………… —Ecclesiastes Bread Upon the Water Oh, the young don’t keep and the old just go, and the keeper of the sheep casts a long, long shadow, and your song won’t come where your life won’t go, so throw your bread on…

Just a Little Time Just a little time with you upon the gleaming sea Just a little time will do and the time will make us free And yes, the sky is our bed tonight Just a little company can make a prairie small And to hear a word or two resounding down the hall…

It Could be Now . . . I feel a cup slip from my grip then I see it heading for the floor . . . ………………. —it could be now I see the morning trees, the jittering leaves of aspens in a breeze above our tool shed dancing. . . ………………. —it could be now I’m…