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A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
Who is this fish, still wearing its wealth,
flat on my drainboard, dead asleep,
its suit of mail proof only against the stream?
What is it to live in a stream,
to dwell forever in a tunnel of cold,
never to leave your shining birthsuit,
never to spend your inheritance of thin coins?
And who is the stream, who lolls all day
in an unmade bed, living on nothing but weather,
singing, a little mad in the head,
opening her apron to shells, carcasses, crabs,
eyeglasses, the lines of fisherman begging for
news from the interior-oh, who are these lines
that link a big sky to a small stream
that go down for great things:
the cold muscle of the trout,
the shining scrawl of the eel in a difficult passage,
hooked-but who is this hook, this cunning
and faithful fanatic who will not let go
but holds the false bait and the true worm alike
and tears the fish, yet gives it up to the basket
in which it will ride to the kitchen
of someone important, perhaps the Pope
who rejoices that his cook has found such a fish
and blesses it and eats it and rises, saying,
“Children, what is it to live in the stream,
day after day, and come at last to the table,
transfigured with spices and herbs,
a little martyr, a little miracle;
children, children, who is this fish?”
from Water Walker, 1989, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

December 15, 2024
I have come to the conclusion that I have entered a new phase in my life, and that I am trying to adjust my behavior and expectations so that they are realistic and age-appropriate. I characterize this phase as preparing to die, and this involves an immense amount of acceptance as well as personal growth. While my consciousness and intellect seems to still operate at what I would call an adult level, my body is very clearly diminished in its capacities. God forbid I would have a fatal disease and a terminal diagnosis and this would all be more urgent and real. But the fact is that I am 84 years old and significantly weaker, limited, and slowed, and sooner or later I will stop breathing, lose consciousness, and no longer exist as a self-aware person occupying space on planet Earth. I have even come to imagine that there is some aspect of my being that is present in me, that preceded and existed before there was a me as such, and that actually may continue as an energetic entity without there being this Bruce as either consciousness or as an embodiment. Soul or spirit is what this entity is popularly referred to as, but those words really don’t have specific enough meaning for me to use them casually. But it is something beyond individual molecules, although if molecules turn out to be “alive” and energetic, which they must be, then I really have no idea what I’m talking about.
In any event, in the same way as if I had a terminal illness, I have a terminal is-ness and I know it, can feel it, appreciate it, accept it…and almost welcome it. I have separation anxiety, but not really non-existence anxiety. The universe is simply too immense in all dimensions, but especially time, for me to expect that my personal self-consciousness has any likelihood of persistence beyond my extinguishment. The drop of mist or spray that momentarily appears as an independent entity on the crest of an ocean wave and then falls back as H2O united with the great oceans is still the clearest analogy I can find to the notion of what my individual existence is. It’s actually a nice feeling when I perceive it in that manner.
And so I lay abed a lot, reading, listening to music, eschewing politics, challenged by how to fill the time, irrelevant and unproductive, comfortably breathing, knowing, being, appreciating. I am almost happy.

Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads,
a woman who feels too much,
a woman who writes…
Don’t fall in love with an educated, magical, delusional, crazy woman.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who thinks,
who knows what she knows
and also knows how to fly;
a woman sure of herself.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who
laughs or cries making love,
knows how to turn her spirit into flesh;
let alone one that loves poetry (these are the most dangerous),
or spends half an hour contemplating a painting
and isn’t able to live without music.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is interested
in politics and is rebellious and
feels a huge horror from injustice.
One who does not like to watch television at all
Or a woman who is beautiful
no matter the features of her face or her body.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is intense,
entertaining, lucid and irreverent.
Don’t wish to fall in love with a woman like that.
Because when you fall in love
with a woman like that,
whether she stays with you or not,
whether she loves you or not,
from a woman like that, you never come back.
~Martha Rivera-Garrido
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
my brain and
heart divorced
a decade ago
over who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become
eventually,
they couldn’t be
in the same room
with each other
now my head and heart
share custody of me
I stay with my brain
during the week
and my heart
gets me on weekends
they never speak to one another
– instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week
and the notes they
send to one another always
say the same thing:
“This is all your fault”
on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the past
and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future
they blame each
other for the
state of my life
there’s been a lot
of yelling – and crying
so,
lately, I’ve been
spending a lot of
time with my gut
who serves as my
unofficial therapist
most nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcage
and slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut’s plush leather chair
that’s always open for me
~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up
last evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head
I nodded
I said I didn’t know
if I could live with
either of them anymore
“my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,”
I lamented
my gut squeezed my hand
“I just can’t live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,”
I sighed
my gut smiled and said:
“in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,”
I was confused
the look on my face gave it away
“if you are exhausted about
your heart’s obsession with
the fixed past and your mind’s focus
on the uncertain future
your lungs are the perfect place for you
there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there either
there is only now
there is only inhale
there is only exhale
there is only this moment
there is only breath
and in that breath
you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out.”
this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leaves
and while my
heart was staring
at old photographs
I packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungs
before I could even knock
she opened the door
with a smile and as
a gust of air embraced me
she said
“what took you so long?”
Poetry
- A Dog Has Died by Pablo Neruda
- A Moment of Silence – by Emmanuel Ortiz
- A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
- A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
- Alone – Jack Gilbert
- Behold this view of “The Four Noble Truths” – Jake Agnew
- Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
- Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
- Failing and Flying – Jack Gilbert
- Feel Mo
- Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
- my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
- The Shyness – Sharon Olds
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Wage Peace – Mary Oliver

Maia speaks – 1998
My mother and father both loved me dearly, both wanted children dearly, were both goodly folk, kind and supportive of me. They also both abandoned me. The scar tissues that have formed over the gaping wounds of their abandonment are thick, stiff, and inflexible. I don’t want them seen, don’t want others touching or noticing them, think of them as my personal scars, protect them as well as wish them gone. I have taken of late to kneading them in the privacy of my study, to giving them a bit more attention, to tentatively rubbing warm sweet waters into the tissues in an effort to get them to soften and yield.
After my mother and father left the commune they lived on in the early seventies, after they separated, after my father left me in his effort to find a place to live and a way to make a living, after my mother’s breakdown, after I pushed the chair over to the wall phone and climbed up on it to call my father, to whisper into the mouth piece softly enough so my mother would not hear me that he must come and take me away, that my mother was feeding me cat food because she thought the government was poisoning us with surplus foods, that I felt unsafe, that I was unsafe, that I was scared, so scared, after that, I went to live with my father.
He lived at the time with a very gentle woman who had also lived on the commune and her two daughters. I wanted to be part of their family, of his family, I wasn’t sure I could be. They all held me and loved me, but the damage had been done. I was frightened by my mother and by the demons she shared so openly with me. I was frightened my father would leave me. I showed none of this. Knew none of this then. That summer my mother went to live with her father in another state, where she bore another daughter, sent me pictures of her new baby, gave that child up for adoption. I was five years old.
Soon afterwards my father separated from the woman he lived with and her daughters. He went to court, fought for, and was awarded custody of me. He had always wanted children of his own and there I was.
My father thought being a single parent was a gift not a burden. And, inasmuch as there was nothing more important or more exciting in his life, I derived the bulk of the benefits, and of the hardships, of his intense and focused caring and love. This is not a conceit of mine; it is historical fact. My father wanted nothing more desperately than to make a good home for me and raise me healthily and happily. My father adored me. He still does.
He had a series of jobs back then, mostly as an administrator of programs for troubled teenagers. He was also unemployed for periods of time. From the end of my third year of public school though the eighth grade, when my soon to become step-mother moved in with us, we lived on the third floor of a triple decker house he owned and maintained amidst the lovely trees, on the hill top, in our multiracial corner of the city. He was always puttering around that house, painting, hammering, sweeping the hallways, taking down walls, caulking windows, checking the boilers. He built my bed and my shelves. He cooked. He loved to cook. I think he thought if he could put good food on the table and maintain a roof over our heads he was doing well as a person. He ran or jogged everyday, tried to get me to accompany him on my bicycle or on roller skates, had a few friends he prized, and always a girlfriend or two, being a man who did not much like being alone.
Even his girlfriends were mostly pluses in my life. They knew my father was deeply committed to me, that anything they might have thought possible with my father in a long-term relationship quite naturally included me. They also seemed genuinely to like me, and I knew that. I was a cute, open, gregarious, friendly child. I was an interesting person capable of sustained thoughtful conversation. I liked their company. They liked mine. They talked to me. They admired me. I admired them, their clothes, their height, their easy way in the kitchen. They brushed my hair. They brought me costume jewelry. And except for the fact I usually had to sit in the back seat of my father’s old car whenever one of them was riding with us, I enjoyed their companionship, our shared conversations, their guidance in matters of womanly style.
It was, of course, my father who did the shopping, did the laundry, cleaned the house, painted my fingernails. The original Mister Mom. “Amazing,” he would say, his eyes genuinely beaming with wonder, “what beautiful hands you have. I can’t believe I’m actually painting my little girl’s fingernails. Unbelievable. I never painted anyone’s fingernails. Hold still will you? Do you like this color? You know this is just like miniature wall painting? Do you know about Michelangelo? Look how the polish goes on so smoothly. Oops, I smeared it. How do you like this color anyway?” He became quite proficient at doing my nails. It was just his way.
My father would also always drive me to school, engage me in conversation concerning my thoughts, his thoughts, our lives, our plans for the day, the week, future travel, the news. He would take me to the movies and athletic events, go roller skating with me, go to parent teacher conferences, encourage me to have my friends over after school or for weekend sleep over parties with the inevitable dance contests that were part of the routine. Then he’d get up in the morning and make pancakes for six or seven, clean the house, clean the kitchen, do the laundry. Write in his journal. Go for a jog. Life was good. On special occasions we would go on “dates,” usually early in the evening, to a rotating bar on the top floor of a hotel overlooking the city and the river. There would be few other patrons out early enough to be sharing the floating rotunda with us. I would order a sophisticated non-alcoholic drink. He would order and nurse a beer. The waitress would bring us cocktail snacks and think we were a cute couple. The chairs were soft and upholstered. The bar spun so slowly you almost forgot you were moving. We talked and talked, the night rode by, and we never bored of things to say.