Theology? It’s where science must answer what came before the Big Bang.

Can anyone even calculate how many seven days that multiplied into? Before?

Now, just look up at that Milky Way overhead, interrupted by a miniscule satellite.

At least we’re on the same page, politically speaking.

When I was growing up, it meant something of a Mount Olympus quality.

Not some kind of norm but an aspiration – a better person and society in the end.

Back before the very culture clash between the two concepts.

Now we add to that the concept of supremacy, not just white but European. Or perhaps, grudgingly, Chinese.

The question remains: How do we encourage excellence?

And what do we name it?

Remembering gazing forlornly at LS, the cheerleader of the mysterious olive skin, and dark brown eyes etc.

Jenny, a year older, at the other end of our street, too.

The ache … tongue-tied, like facing a childhood hero or famous actor or scientist …

A shadow of that looking at prime foliage.

I’ve already mentioned telephone books.

And rotary telephones.

And now phonebooths and pay phones in general.

It’s largely gone over to donations, too, which typically prefer online credit card entries rather than paper checks. Try finding the address to send that check when you’re searching their website, perhaps on your smart phone.

For that matter, handling cash in general is overshadowed by those plastic cards.

Parking kiosks that demand credit cards do upset me, though.

I know I’m overlooking a lot more. Care to add to the list?

 

When she said she wasn’t good enough for me, it turned out she was right.

Oh, my, the things I uncovered later.

I really was so green.

Others can say the same of me.

Do I want to save it

or move ahead in my life?

Who am I, really? What do I want to be remembered for?

Raccoon as a Trickster, a local Native twist.

Why be clever?

“The distance I felt came not from the country or the people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.”— narrator in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood set in Montana

A viral carousel.

Quaker by degrees. Turn up the heat?

Quaker vagabonds were Dharma bums, too. The itinerant ministry proffers its own humor.

Things I learned in two years of college French? Le is pronounced luh.

As a youth, I admired crystals grown from supersaturated solutions. Deep blue copper sulfate was my favorite.

I never expected a film literature course under Harry Geduld would influence my poetry as much as my college writing class under poet Dick Allen. But it did: the clash of thesis and antithesis producing an unanticipated synthesis in reaction, especially.

When I first began reading contemporary poetry (for pleasure, independent of classroom assignment), he sensed that often the poem existed as a single line or two, with the rest of the work as window dressing. Now I read the Psalms much the same way, for the poem within the poem, or at least the nugget your or I as the psalmist is to wrestle with on this occasion. Psalm 81, for instance, has both “voice in thunder” and “honey from rock.”

I’m past the bitterness, the years – all the lost potential.