Gong and Pennywhistle You can play a cheap tin pennywhistle or beat on a big gold gong. Down here on earth in the soft grass or stinging thistles nobody stays here for long —nobody stays here for long, those up on high and those way down low breathe the same bitter air, we’ll just have…

Burning Bush At twenty I danced the tops of walls— Nijinsky of the double top plate bent in-two like an onion shoot unbending up through an earthen gate, lifting sticks to be put in place, nailing their tails held against my boot, walking the wires of gravity’s net as a spider commands its filament web…

Lucky Again Yesterday today might never have come but I’m lucky again It did and here you are my bulwark against a lone sea. In the garden you began years ago in our plot of sand where little grew but wild strawberries close to the ground, their tendrils groping dry earth, we now have hibiscus…

Current Tally: I’m out here stacking days as if it were a sport, I’m up to twenty thousand six hundred eight. I sweat memory. I’ve taken off my shirt, I’m feeling great, but as I stack them up time is growing short. I tally what till now I’ve done. Not far from a stack of stones…

Another Piece of Eternity I’m peeling back a page reading a new day by the light of a new sun. Mom died years ago, or was it yesterday? I once read something similar by Camus but was too new to understand that time bleeds, its dyes are not fast but run between years and sometimes…

Driver’s License Renewal Photo I take a look and first think, whoa! you look like the father of a 50-year old,then think, whoa! you are the father of a 50-year old,then think, whoa! you look like somebody’s grandpa,then think, whoa! you are somebody’s grandpa,then think, whoa! you look like somebody’s great-grandpa,then think, whoa! you are…

Fugitive Big brown bison walks the white line of a two-lane, black eyes scanning for a sign. Regarding asphalt he wonders what happened to the grass. How did this black ribbon come to bisect my meadow between talus and hundred-foot pines, and where are the columbine? He asks no one in particular because not even…

Einstein & Etta James I’m fourteen when Einstein is in Princeton He’s old & heading out of breath as I am fresh and new at breathing in some But there the landscapes of the space between our ears divides Al used levers of his mind for lifting mass in time, while mine took to bass…

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,…