week of November 20 - 26, 2006

A Man With No Teeth Serves Us Breakfast | I'd Like to Bake Your Goods | Stolen Mummies | Brendan Constantine is My Kind of Town
Up Liberty's Skirt | Feeding Holy Cats | Mowing Fargo | I'm a Jew, Are You? | Lizard King of the Laundromat | I Am My Own Orange County
Paris: It's The Cheese | Poetry Super Highway | Judaic Links | Rick's Bookmarks | Cobalt Poets
E-mail Rick | Other Cool Rick Stuff / Upcoming Readings | Who The Hell Is Rick

Train Song In the approach to all that is oncoming-- At the crossroads to longing, a pre-echo plinth of steam, just before the longest man-made noise. Each time, making it up as it goes along. Almost a psalm, almost a heavenly invention like the ancient dawn. Steel black bull, unstoppable. Remember Louie Armstrong blowing, as in the things that will never be the same? A sailor left on a train of good intentions. I watched him run to catch the red-eye. Her red eyes were a host of possibility in good-bye. Hands wave to the clothes-lines of our lost descendents. At every depot, it pushes a doorbell to the heart's yearning. We're overcome by its sheer force of will, both urgent and tranquil as the prism of a steady rain. The stretch of impediments. our blinking eyes railing past window boxes, boarded windows, past all that stays in one place. Boxcars fanning out to the fabricated land. We've lost the art of junkyards in history's random chain, derailed memories to non-sequential freight. Weightless, I'll wait for its unhurried dirge tracking the intangible ache, ghost-like as wind-chimes catching a clack of wind. (First appeared in The Seattle Review)

Crow's Day They know we’re here I hoot imitating the owl heard in the dark to chase the crows in the backyard They hunch in their black winged splendor carrion eaters calling to each other like some dark game of marco polo Earlier two hawks pass in the trees perching for a moment outside my window I ponder their identity as predators large as bowling pins silent as a dream I do not know their names but they are warriors Later a solitary hawk flutters through the sky attacking and fleeing a clatter of crows social eaters of the dead. Now for the third evening in a row two large crows sit on a tall tree overlooking the garden cawing reedy loud clear as a nightmare the crows see me cup my hands to my mouth calling the night-stalker owls to kill them as they sleep and rob their nests in the dark Their sharp high calls return my call like a bully's taunt a call and response of threat and defiance The two crows watch unmoving, until I carry the sound of the owl under their tree where they cannot see me Then there is the wet black flap of silent flight