Heraclitus

Brooking changes

By a river, not in

Anybody’s book.

Summer

insisting

song

of

thr

u

mm

ing

ci

ca

da

ca

u

ght

in

cup

pd

hands.

Momentum

Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight ahead, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed.

--Newton’s First Law of Motion

Hurrying out

Of the baker’s

To bring the still

Warm daily bread home,

This somebody comes close

To missing

The funeral notice tacked

On the light post

But does pause long

Enough to see

It’s nobody

He knows or else

He would’ve been stopped

Right there and then,

Cold too—like you

Or me.

The Intricate Evasions of As, Selected Poems, 1985-2010

In between swimming and relaxing, most of my creative energies these past five days were spent trying to come to terms with a manuscript (see photo above, courtesy of Eleni) that I’ve been wrestling with over the past 25 years and which has burgeoned from a chapbook of about 40 poems to a monster ms. now comprised of approximately 120. I don’t even want to think about how many times I’ve inserted new poems into the ms. or taken old ones out, or how often I’ve juggled the poems in a vain attempt to find the best possible arrangement or how the much smaller original manuscript was accepted by a publisher in England back in the 90s but who later informed me that he couldn’t do it owing to a lack of funds or that about ten years ago, I sent a longer version to a small-press publisher in the western US who rejected it after two years or that five years after that, I sent another even longer version to a small-press publisher on the east coast who also rejected it after two years—all of which leads me to what Joe Hutchison has to say about Bill Knott’s post re publishing one’s work: Do you DIY or keep sending it out in hopes that some publisher will mercifully DI4U—perhaps even before you die?

A Way from It All

For five days. At a villa overlooking the Ionian, courtesy of a dear friend.