Rob failed at retirement twice; pray the third attempt sticks. The upside of failure is his memoir, The Road Taken, published by Purple Breeze Press and available at Amazon.com as a Kindle download or in paperback.
Thanks to all 45 of you who’ve downloaded a copy or foregone a latte and bought a paperback. If you found anything worth mentioning while reading it, feel free to leave an Amazon review and get me closer to triple digits.
What people are saying
“Robert, one day this will all be yours.” (Never happened.)
— John B., Importer of European foods, 1977.
“In The Road Taken, Robert Friedman writes a new comedy of manners about New York City’s academia in the 1980s and 90s. In a graduate student’s New York, everything happens in public, even those excruciating moments in the Dean’s Office, the classroom, the lecture hall, and in the streets. With wit and warmth, Friedman is our story-teller of that public-news era.”
— Fergal O’D. CUNY GC survivor and Mayor of North Park.
Frequently Asked Questions
In case you’re curious …
Will you ever work in academia again?
Apparently, no.
What is your favorite quote?
“Academics like to eat s**t, and in an pinch, they don’t care whose s**t they eat.” Stanley Fish, “The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos”
Besides hunting errant golfballs, what are you doing with all your free time?
Writing and reading. A few people think enough of it to nominate one of my poems for a Pushcart Prize and another for a Best of the Net.
All but one of the following appeared first at poetsonline.org. Each is in response to a prompt from the editor, found in the archived monthly issues noted below each poem.
SAN DIEGO SUNRISE
III and III and III Then XI peals Each a caress, a Carmelite stroke Smoothly wresting sleepy dreams From canyon dwellers Hours earlier The coyotes called Their own measured sadness Filled the canyon Then two owls Softly rousing one another Each from their own eucalyptus branch Reaching beyond the cliff’s edge We all share South of 8 East of 5 West of 15 The whoosh of tires Constant, nearly indiscriminate Forcing our attention From the sonorous morning givers Each morning they reveal me An incursion An alien
(October 2020)
MY SISTER’S LAMP
I haven’t seen one like it since it cracked apart. The exterior, now ceramic shards and chunks, Once a field of roses Wrapped like a thoroughbred’s winning garland, Into its shapely, curvy form.
Pink and white and red and salmon-hued plaster pieces Helpless on the floor. What a mistake, entering her forbidden space, Destined to be found out, but now so obvious, The marks of trespass, unalterable.
“You’ll make a lousy burglar,” our mother said As she coaxed me off a stone ledge At the top of the block And back to the house, Grateful for her refuge from the anger soon to be.
(December 2020)
TAPS
We left him outside of Gilroy, Where signs for Andersen’s Pea Soup Pull travelers off of Interstate 5. Sere hills surround his remembrance field.
White cattle, black cattle laze above the uniform markers. The hay truck bumps and bounces into their view. They know fresh bales will tumble off the back. They make excited noises and run fast down the hill.
The hay truck leaves, their lowing loses urgency. Some chew, others nudge their young, protective. He rests beyond the signs that warned us about Rattlesnakes amid the graves.
(February 2021)
SNOW
Snow sieves onto the stones, Intent on muffling permanence Leaving pasts and futures silenced.
Flakes twist and cling to flakes To swarm and mask our memory, Challenging our stance and desire.
Sun and days dissolve it. Yet darkness returns its resolve To bear its weight on what remains.
(April 2021)
CAMELOT
Listening to him sing, crammed into the middle of our bamboo-framed couch, sisters on both sides of me hopping off it to grab the knob of the B&W Zenith, knowing it would be tuned back to Ed Sullivan as soon as our mother noticed, flints of awe and acceptance confirm that such a voice could never come from me.
If only sharing a birthday has the alchemical power of turning the larynx of an eight-year-old suburban ordinary into the steady baritone of a French Canadian my father’s age, his aura of dark brooding, his sardonic smirk to the camera, projecting Sir Lancelot’s confidence.
Does his older sister also have a birthday just days after his own? Does his special day also disappoint because Thanksgiving gets in the way? Does he also have a pair of battling uncles who ruin even that hated holiday? Would I ever escape to Camelot and stand between Arthur and Guinevere? Would I ever muster the courage to sing “If Ever I Should Leave You” to Alice Rose?
That we also share a first name should bolster the outcomes of magical thinking. I close my eyes and open my chest of amulets and spells.
(June 2021)
A BIRTHDAY NOTE FOR YOU, SON
I watched a gray squirrel outside my office window. It chose a laurel tree to build a wintering nest.
Perhaps you might find a way to tell me, though I no longer sense the world as you do, why the fading laurel and not the still-vibrant sugar maple, whose full branches stretch westward and would shield it from view, or even the light-hued oak, as rich with acorns as the laurel is with gnarled limbs and branches?
It’s the sort of question that no one has asked me since your why years — why is she crying; where is he running to? I dream. Does the cat? From the back seat, on the highway — who’s at the head of the line?
I wondered then why it mattered to you, such mundane happenstances of seeming vital import. I realize now how each question was a leafed twig gnawed into utility, a stem that added tensile strength to your own wonder-nest, and how sweetly it has circled back to mine.
(September 2021)
RIP, DAD
It’s as if, like Goneril, I’d spent my life waiting him out, the tense-lipped eldest daughter.
Cold even in the small room down the hall from where he laid, tubed and monitored, my siblings silently accepting their grief having as many sources as my vengeance has motives.
Years have passed yet “Ingratitude, that marble-hearted fiend” defines me still, dismissing “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child.”
I did not intend to “Dismantle so many folds of favor.” Better to sew them together, wear them ostentatiously, my emblem of how “Pride is not plainness.”
(November 2021)
PAR 4
In the naive times, with belt-length hair and a copy of Mao’s little red book at his hip, he watched her not watch him. She was lustrous curls and he was fifteen, all id and aching.
In the angry times, consumed by betrayal stunning him flat, he railed through his day, wondering where the ache had gone.
In the knowing times, dismay rested on one side of the fulcrum as he gathered the opposite of grimness.
Rounding the turn at Torrey Pines, as bald as the ball at his toe, he watched a schooner rise and fall, and all was id and aching.
OBLIQUITY
The impish perverse sat astride my nape As gleeful I strode down 8th Avenue. He latched on the trim of the barker’s cape And turned me into the Play Pen Revue.
(March 2022)
THE JARLSBERG’S IN
The thud of the trailer greeting the dock moved his bovine gaze from the window to the floor, to his knees, to fingernails as scuffed and chipped as his steel-toed boots.
I followed him out of the break room where the crew begins and ends the day where the oak tag blanks sit next to the stencil press on a shelf above a can of ink-stained brushes.
The first container of the day was filled with square boxes of round cheeses from the Nordic dairy lands of his grandparents now time-filtered myths and memories.
Onto the rollers he’d painted battleship grey just weeks ago he placed a layer of boxes and another atop another until he couldn’t see around or over his wall of cardboard brown.
I tried to match his metronomic arms extending swiveling the cold cases moving onto other rollers chocked with shims forts of cheese on wheels.
He watched me fail, fail to align the bottom layer so the corners didn’t snag a wall fail to rest one box edge precisely atop another to steady their ride with concentrated weight.
He tapped his pack of Newport to pull one with his lips reached for his lighter and sighed, silent until he inhaled his comfort and blew it from the corner of his mouth readying himself to mete out instruction.
(April 2022)
TO JILL, CLASS OF ’77
I knew I was back in Ripon only by waking up beneath your hand-sewn quilt. You didn’t ask me to explain Oshkosh. I’m still in thrall of the scent of your bed.
Years before, I portaged to Lake Linda. Embers cooled as stars brightened and I rose to chirping and twig stems cracking, alone, sated by sleeping on a pine straw bed.
Younger still, I made my way to Greylock, my frenetic innocence suspended at once, then dismissed for eternity. The mountain doubled as my manly bed.
That Ripon morning was love’s grace defined. That hand-sewn quilt, my romantic sublime.
(May 2022)
JONES BEACH
Reaching the heat-hazed noise of the Southern State with baby oil shellac reeking flinching with each reminder of car rules, no sand on the blanket, ten steps from the water all that dissipated with my turn in the marine green blue surrounding my mother surrounding me as we bobbed with the rolling Atlantic swells her tensioned voice lost to a soothing lullaby.
(July/August 2022)
NEAR MONTAUK
August’s just an interruption with potential a drowsy slack between Independence and Labor Day an empty clothesline before sun-up.
Each morning takes on a sheen as light and consequential as the silvering wooden pins she’ll clip to the line before it bears weight.
With the sunset rest the trawlers off Napeague dipping their prows as rhythmically as she squeezes the pin springs and bows toward the basket.
(July/August 2022)
A GUIDE TO AMERICAN LETTERS
After all the time Torn between them, Hester, Come sit with me, Rest with me by the rivulet, Its cool water coursing lightly Over our toes. You don’t know all the time I imagined what Arthur whispered To you after yet another day Of Roger’s churlishness. I have no sense of what he said, Or how he said whatever it was that led To Pearl. Hold my hand, dear Hester. Pulse that memory of the moment, Of the rush you felt, The flush that negated Roger And let it flow to me. For that is my desire, bold Hester, To know the words, to swallow them, So that I too can learn to navigate The prism of your heart.
(October 2022)
STEM RESISTANT
I think my uncle wanted a boy to share his awe of wondrous science. Birthdays brought biographies of Galileo and Pasteur, chemistry sets with the potential to amaze. His eagerness unanswered, my pilot light, unlit.
Junior high introduced us to Vocational Technology. Woodshop yielded boxy lamps and bruised fingers. Boys with talent or a parent’s consent moved on to Automotive, while the rest returned to the safety of Spanish 2.
We came back from the Summer of Love to a world where engineers were cool. They answered Kennedy’s call and even taught a mechanical flag to ripple irregularly in the stolid silence of the moon.
In Mr. Walsh’s summer school math class he failed to inspire as Euclid would: ‘There is no royal road to geometry.’ His chalk arcing over our dopey heads, exploding against cinderblock and getting our attention.
(December 2022)
RYE PLAYLAND
Without the clickety-clack of the Wild Mouse plunging us kids into free fall mayhem, candy apples awaiting our mother’s opening bite, or BB guns chained to the counter, empty of shot, no longer bruising targets
lifeguards gone other places for the evening, barkers, accepting the emptiness of stalls, silenced, circle their fingers over Old Fashioned rims, bumper car wranglers having wiped down seats leave their charging brutes in a line
I dream of waiting by locked gate, inhaling, succumbing to the Sound’s salt air rooting tickets out of my jeans pockets, grasping these talismans, absorbing their potential and wishing closer the next sunrise, joyful again.
(February 2023)
PRIMOGENITURE IN THE LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE
(William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Part 2 Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the gold watch scene)
This watch was your great-granddaddy’s war watch, Then when he had done his duty, put it in an ol’ coffee can.
your grandfather was a Marine facing death.
Winocki, he paid a visit, delivering to your infant father, his Dad’s gold watch.
This watch your birthright.
And now, little man, I give
The watch
Grandfather’s Father gave it
said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire the reducto absurdum of all human experience you may remember time you might forget it spend all your breath trying to conquer it.
battle reveals victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
(April 2023)
IN THE OLD MINA REES LIBRARY
Meeting in the B aisle after class knowing that no one reads philosophy anymore we traced fingertips around wrists, across lifelines while feigning scrutiny of titles and authors anticipating the transcendent moment of frisson’s return.
(July 2023)
NOW I UNDERSTAND, IN THREE RONKAS
My fifth grade teacher laughed when correcting me that ‘decrepit’ isn’t a Yiddish word. What I learned from that embarrassing experience is the greater value in dictionaries than my grandmother spitting out phlegm filled syllables.
What I learned from my little sister is that being funny can be endearing. My big sister never learned that lesson. She did figure out how to disappoint her chuckling parents by making that obvious.
From my father, right arms figure significantly in the Newtonian Law of Automobile Deceleration. From my mother, the definition of love: lifting her grandchildren with arms draped in bath towels, hugging them from the tub.
(August 2023)
THE NOISE AND THE SIGNAL
She threaded string through two can bottoms and handed the Jolly Green Giant to me Chef Boyardee to my sister.
We paced apart enough for the string to tauten, enough to mumble nonsense, mishear secrets.
Clearing out her garage lifetimes later we found the cans, their icons faded yet confident in white toque and green leaf.
But the string had broken long ago, sending us off into time’s maelstrom and the constant roar of solitary silence.
(October 2023)
ABOVE AND BELOW
I’m lost in a steady grief that collars me to an unrelenting remembering of her, one that wraps its grip on my nape as a jailer might.
The stinging din of the shovel’s tip meeting the hard, ancient earth acts like sonar siting the place where I’m scoring a hole’s perimeter, one deep enough to contain the sadness.
But now a Chasteberry tree roots there, with purple-green leaves and violet berries molding the morning sun into a jailer’s key, loosening the collar.
(November 2023)
WHEN THE MOURNING DOVES RETURN
When the mourning doves return they bring enthusiasm, a biological glee, as they chase and nip on wing, coo sweetly in unison.
When the nest building begins I rise to watch, like past years, to witness the gathering, the framing of a cradle, the cushioning of the bowl.
Two eggs to blanket gently will appear at some point soon, as I wait and watch close by, unlike the circling hawk, its sightline obscured by leaves.
The hatchlings will strain agape to receive the sacrament. Their first flights sadly signal the close of my annual break from the quotidian.
(January 2024)
GRANDMA’S MORDANT POTPOURRI
The hallway smelled abandoned. At the door a metallic whiff of industrial paint and my mother’s saliva’d handkerchief across my cheek.
We waited forever for the apartment door’s hinges to sound the first note of dread for the kids facing our Grandma’s mordant potpourri.
A broiler rack of chicken. Frozen fries in the oven. A box of thawed out peas sat on the formica counter, burner waiting for a match.
Infused into it all was the sour smoke of Pall Mall, glass ashtrays strategically placed, all at a casual reach to flick an ash, to snub
the last and rest the next and catch the errant flecks of sot weed that inevitably made their way from her lips to her tongue, to her stained fingertips.
(March 2024)
THE GENERAL STORE
Generations of Hildreths tended the general store and post office, long before Moses split the Bronx and paved Long Island, and a runway
for Piper Cubs and Cessnas demanded a tower, and the artists ceded summers to young Wall Street wives in Land Rovers, speeding to lunch dates.
Once the village carpenter, back from Nam, hung pigeon holes on a wall, each with a small keyed door and a brass number, Mrs. Hildreth grew as wary
as curious about handing a mailbox key to a new face even though title had changed. Familiarity was lost in a haze of beforetime.
A Topping child holding a parent’s hand, eyeing glass jars of taffy and fudge. So with the Bensons and the Comforts, who had sold off, over time,
their acres of potatoes, their tractors and plows, and watched the sandy land bloom stick-built bungalows, then grander homes of impractical design.
Few of the keys, decades old, are still handed down to son, to grandchild, all of whom had grown to know a Hildreth who sorted bills and letters and
angled them into boxes as the one-room schoolhouse rang its opening bell, calling to a new generation of Halses, Piersons, Toppings,
whose after-school chore, was to greet Mrs. Hildreth before using their mail key and bring the envelopes home, unlike the Wall Street wives,
who never see a Hildreth, or hold a mail key. The house staff will drop the children at tennis camp or the stables. Wives wait for their phones to charge.
(June 2024)
BOY, I SAY BOY!
Chancellor Sanders, Provost Perdue, eminent faculty and imminent graduates of Chicken Tech, today is your day. Ol’ Leghorn won’t castigate you for not paying attention and I won’t be paddling poor Barnyard Dawg. Unwind your expectations of hearing “I say, I say, boy” — it’s not going to happen. As an alum, I’m here to support your proud moment with a word to the wise.
I’m proud of strutting down the Champs-Élysées once we Doughboys whooped those Nazis — not the decades of playing the overbearing buffoon, still bumping around your parents’ memories. That’s another storyboard, the one where your grandmothers fill their kids with Frosted Flakes and Nesquik, sugar-charging the absurdly happy violence of Merrie Melodies.
My booming baritone and down-home banter may have made them come back for more, but I’m not proud of crooning Foster’s Doo Dahh lines of racist minstrelsy that those fascists at Loony Tunes scripted this rooster to hum between gratuitous beatdowns.
Take note, roosters and hens: take care whose direction you take. Even these bloviators on the roost behind me here at Chicken Tech. Direction from egoists will trip up your fortunate future, when fate and chance are singing in the same key all the live-long day.
(September 2024)
PONYTAIL
On the way back east after my collegiate fail I stopped in Lake Forest to seek solace from my old high school girlfriend who had spent her freshman year as someone else.
She said, you’re braiding that ponytail now? It’s not a good look. Let me help you — which is what I was after, why I was there — and reached for her scissors. There, she said, holding it up. Feel better?
(November 2024)
THAT PICTURE
That picture of you two, two generations reaching for each other. Two baldies, your hair coming in, his gone. Two sets of stubby fingers, our lot, my dear boy.
You weren’t a year in that picture; he was over sixty. I’m older than he was then, balding quickly, with one hand still reaching for each of you.
(December 2024)
AFTER THE BURIAL (nominated for Best of the Net)
Back at the house, my aunt had covered the mirror above the mantle where his relics were on display.
Mourners strained to see what isn’t. Lost in memories — the essential and the out of place — their fingertips ran across the arms of threadbare couches.
The women who knew this kitchen best continued to speak in hushed, graveside voices and move hesitantly around each other.
The house was unusually cool, cool like the earth that each of us had shovelled back into the pit.
We shared a chilly weariness, standing by the front door, winter coats on our arms, pressing against all of what is and what is not.
(February 2025)
JOHN DONNE AT THE DEPARTMENT MEETING, LEAKING OPTIMISM
We assemble, as we do, around a glass-topped table in an unremarkable room. We organize our spaces and watch the stragglers find relief in spotting a seat left open near their least objectionable colleague.
We await the arrival of Agenda, who will feign delight in being among one’s peers and make noises of hesitation and resignation and other tells of discomfort, to which one of us will respond with a sigh of beleaguered support.
And as we nestle into the molded seat of a wooden chair and ponder the futility of expectations, we realize yet again that we are here, each and all, united only by the begrudging acceptance of time passing, and our invisibility.
And like a wave or random swell, an inchoate thought emerges in our fluttering Agenda medias res, a near-silent muttering as unintelligible as our collective indifference is wan, and a “well, then, let’s begin” sparks yawns and exhalations.
And we dare to look around into eyes that recognize the complacency we’ve imbued in each other and hear our own mocking inner thought, “let’s not.” For though we all are credentialed and ranked, though most of us wonder how, we each harken silently back to crisper days of eager anticipations of respect and published profundities, all turned into a shared dismay.
We know there could be something good, should we pretend to be stroking as a team, with ears attuned toward a coxswain’s call, yet instead we find our common desire in longing for this time to pass, for all time to pass, and imagine making our way to the parking deck and flashing an ironic gallows smile at our fellow travelers.
(March 2025)
ODE TO PROPOFOL
Last night I dreamt of my father lying in his hospital bed, a tech separating his wedding ring from his finger as my siblings debate with his doctors and fail to defeat time and truth.
Tomorrow, it’s my turn for the ether, plus a Milk of Amnesia chaser, after following doctor’s orders, including wearing no jewelry. My wedding ring’s in a jewelry box amid some other time-worn totems I’ve gathered.
All the reassurances of tomorrow’s event being low risk, routine, and not a worry, are worn brakes against doom and dread yet still resist any slippage into calm or confidence there’s a blissful common end.
Except when all tenses lose their power and logic-defying metaphors of rings extend far beyond the fog and muck of memory filling any void between love and joy existing as quanta, becoming all there is.
(June 2025)
ALASKAN ELEMENTS
Juneau’s Gold Creek ripples, salving river rock. Bald eagles own a different current above. I’m jealous of a dog’s indifference to the water’s force as he ambles.
(August 2025)
SUPERSATURATED SOLUTION
Water rushes through river rocks speckled with silver and cobalt, fixed against the banks like resting kits against a relentless wind. Clouds above counter other forces, their fluid forms also adaptations to space and time.
The stones on the riverbank remain stones lodged in silt and sand, unlike us, more interested in the just noticeable difference, in experiencing what’s nearly imperceptible as if the perception of change is change itself.
Would we tweens, on learning of Lot’s wife, how looking back at Sodom was enough for an angry God to drop a pipette of vengeance into her soul, sealing her salty fate, learn the lesson?
The chemists know how to solidify water, the precise proportions of solute to liquid that with one more drop will turn sloshing beakers of liquid into crystalline form and stun a roomful of seventh graders.
Would we ever feel a similar profundity, when looking back at the river, know but not see how the rapids shape the shore, or succumb to the beauty of glinting stones resisting the water’s press?
(October 2025)
Is San Diego as wonderful as everyone says it is?
Yes, it’s the finest city in the state: great weather, senior-friendly, and the golf is cheap.
Who do you recommend everyone read?
Walter Abish, Dino Buzzati, Anne Carson, Michael Chabon, Neil Genzlinger, Benjamin Labatut, Ben Lerner, Emmanuel Levinas, Mark Leyner, Herman Melville, Linda Pastan, George Saunders, and Edith Wharton.
What sums up the zeitgeist of the summer of 2025?
ONE THING’S FOR SURE
We won’t need to heed Melville’s warning to the gullible: “the might-have-been is but Boggy ground to build on.”
Nor dream and hope for What could-never-be While the Confidence-Man Tweets.
Let whimsy reign. Let the body Belch ebullience And seed what-will-be.
Feel the sunshine on your chin. Today has no governor.
(November 2020)
MORNING WALK
Sidewalks and their four-foot widths are just enough for the hound dog and me. For her a leash length to sniff and For myself (Now and then stumble stepped) lost bereft (Amid cracks in panels and twig-scribed names) roots in the open.
A rainbow of impressed letters: Geo. H. Oswald, Contractor, And subordinate, dates decades long gone. Cordoned in the city’s work Why – concrete freshly poured, an elixir, for George’s name an honor framed, a shared pride? Could they have known George, as I have come to? Will his echoed call rise to a stranger’s voice? Will my fancy allow his hardened plea?
Over decades we pedestrians have eyed the corner before us. Not the precise lettering above a random date his name his title the day’s remembrance. He confidently mixed city water and sandy compound, high-sided shovels full of anticipated pride his gift our passage.
(January 2021)
ETCH A SKETCH
Immediate disappointment. Twisting two white nobs Would be less fun than Watching my box turtle Trundle along the surface Of its shoebox home At the prospect of wilted lettuce. But after my sisters lost interest in One knob scribing across the glass, Its partner, up and down, They waved Le Télécran like a wand, Dismissing it to me.
At recess the envied, prodigy pianist Soon discovered he could transcend its limits By turning both knobs simultaneously, Inventing visual improvisations that Produced as little awe in elementary audiences As his recitals. Back home, I made no attempt At facsimile houses or rocket ships Or sought comment on my alphabetic derring-do, Carving secrets onto glass, Attempting a voice to offset The flippancy of siblings.
(March 2021)
EXIT
The day was as it will be again Quotidian, pedestrian, a bit humid. I could tell, as you are now telling As I am foretelling how thuddingly ordinary It was and is and will be. I was indecisive as I well might be Tenaciously tentative, not a party On two feet, my toe sketching Some inchoate premonition in the sand An effort to keep ennui at bay. The broken, pebbled, used-to-be grassy grounds Continue to spawn weeds despite The foot traffic becoming Even more obnoxious as the East End Turns, like me, intense, perturbed, hasty. All this amid the constancy of the ocean tide Breakers of all sizes and valances Pitching against the bland, hard-pack sand That catches some water And tosses some back.
(May 2021)
HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE
I have tried what seems a lifetime to understand the two of you. Brooding silently and alone like a barn owl, Nathaniel, while Herman rages, Lear-like, only to regain his own assuredness once again, briefly, and once again. Like brothers bleeding truths differently, you clasped hands. How I wished I was in the dells below Mt. Greylock with you to see the genius break through, not lost amid the sunlight piercing meadow grass that so pained your eyes in the morning. The two of you, elbows joined in sharp admiration and wonder, matched by your shared agony born of sublime recognition that you’d dismiss at summer’s end even though it refused to quit you. I didn’t know, at sixteen, driving to my own carnal initiation in a Berkshires cabin atop Mt. Greylock, that so many years later I’d be in your thrall, returning to it evermore, and not to hers, though we’d groped and fumbled our way to whatever I’d hoped would last, a different transcendence I’d recognize as sublime in a different way.
(August 2021)
SYSTEM PREFERENCES
He chose the white cup that had her name red painted by one of the grandchildren while waiting out the rain.
Eleven more surrounded it in the cupboard, each one eponymous, all empty objects now, variables no longer called.
The array was limited to evocative names, properties of those who strained to mute their masked and simmering grievances.
Each cup a pointer to the family tree, glazed totems of generational sadness and anger that time congealed into classes of disappointment.
Each one a token without purchase, standing amassed, atrophied and brittle, each a martyr’s reliquary of regrets.
If the grandparents’ cups, then two versions of a dream else ones containing the rivalry of their sons and daughters or the palpable bewilderment of the next generation.
He chose his wife, as no one else would dare, to once again review and recollect and reassess his time and memory of her.
That very cup so often resting on butcher block as she takes in the ocean with every sense, and watches a bumblebee alight for the daylily’s nectar.
(October 2021)
(December 2021)
21ST-CENTURY WESTERN DREAM
Leaving Twin Falls Coming down off the hills of southern Idaho, two pastures glisten from refracting snow traces. The absence of cattle, of tracks and tumbleweed makes the emptiness harsh unlike the pastures just miles due south, just short of Jackpot, Nevada where the sun has cleared whatever snow had idled on the lustrous green field bounded by a river that feeds the grassland, which feeds the cattle which feeds the cattleman’s sons and daughters and your sons and daughters.
Employee of the Month
Jackpot is cold this morning, like all mornings in some way. In Barton’s Club 93 parking lot the wind rides up my thigh and down the strings of my hoodie, pink and stained and missing the sequined S in STAR. Boot heels sink into the slush of one parking spot after another on my way into work, where the croupier is distracted as a glint of daylight pulses once and disappears behind me.
High Times
I back my rig into the lot at Mona’s Ranch, where my trailer won’t block their wind-worn sign and its symmetry with the others is somehow sublime. Inside, the barroom banquettes reek of oily Naugahyde. I doff my Cattleman’s Crease and look past whoever Mona is that day and mumble my desire. She choreographs the sisters’ entrance to the foyer. This troop of runaways, meth-heads, and single moms can’t conjure a cure for me.
Losing
I tug my uniform on inside the employees lounge at Barton’s and check my nails. I want to keep their eyes on my fingers as they grip their cards and scuff the felt hoping they don’t bust. They lean in, their weight at the edge of the table, waiting for the right card to turn, or sitting tight, ready for this daughter to lose.
Southerly
We stay on 93. Long-haulers split off east and west where Wells meets 80. Players mark their time in Jackpot, while truckers sound their horns and tip their hats to fare thee well their brothers. Ely awaits us, then Pioche and Caliente, where the Meadow Valley Wash glances off the highway. We head west, then south, collapsing into 15 near Vegas, where the Jackpot Star cannot go and Mona’s Ranch has no purchase.
(February 2022)
ANTHROPOMORPHIZE NOW
Be my guest, man. It’s as easy as ordering online. Your Mocha Latte is my Puppuccino. Same bliss going down.
You know what I like because you know what you like. Forget what the trainer says. You can’t be confident in high-rising terminals.
She’s been trained to train, sure, but where are her dogs right now? Heads on bed pillows, drifting in and out of dreams not of what can’t or shouldn’t be.
We know what bacon smells like, just like you. We know a loving caress that leads to a gaze that yields even more delivery of joy.
(June 2022)
THE REUNION ABOLITION ACT OF 2022
It is established that we shall no longer rehearse the past. The chance to meet that moment left the moment that moment left.
Only certainty of plague and uncomfortable doubt surround us. Inescapable through recurring graduations or anniversaries of death.
That wisp of inbreathe is recognition that memories don’t align. An inward sigh we dare not share.
Unlike the car wreck curiosity that propels so many into disappointing hotel rooms with unmerciful mirrors and inadequate light.
Amidst other echoes of previous name-tagged events, we fail to reduce the distance of time.
Therefore, enacted on this day, no longer shall our phones vibrate the news that reunion is nigh.
Mickey says it’s time to embrace yourself, whoever you are these days.
(September 2022)
THE FICTION OF TENSES
Lecturing on poetry from the Lyceum stage, Thoreau made a distinction between ‘two kinds of writing, both great and rare. One that of genius, or the inspired, the other of intellect and taste, in the intervals of inspiration.’
We dwell in those gaps, float aimlessly amid wisps of ennui, fumbling for a crutch, a coma dose of novocaine. They’re safe spaces, these liminal places. Like amber containing the whir of change, a balm for the ache of effort.
We aren’t even diligent metaphysicians anymore, like sad Fechner, searching the physical for the soul. He succumbed to the fashion of the new science, focused on measuring the just noticeable difference, when somehow the mind and the body shake hands and we become aware.
Somehow the measuring suffices, assuages, inures. But for the likes of old Walt, who knew he was ‘never measured and never will be measured,’ or Anne Carson, who answers by asking, ‘For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?’ our constant is the interstitial, without a toehold on the stones of then and too far from to be, not abiding the fiction of tenses.
(November 2022)
TO DAVID HARRIS, RIPON COLLEGE DEAN OF MEN, 1973
(RIP, Tom Hoehne and AJ Bumby, townies extraordinaire)
An early spring drive from Milwaukee to Ripon past fallow cornfields and Mercury Motors to a red-brick campus with North-Central blondes.
I climbed the stone stairs and took a seat in your office. I said, I’ll take you if you’ll take me. Our handshake pledged all good things for Fall.
But my roommate smoked Winston and my hash didn’t last. The Racine girls plied me with Schnapps. Microdot turned my first C into whatever. But taunts of Jew from the frosh dorm did not.
After the MDA run to Oshkosh, I climbed your stairs again. You said, This is for the best, and extended your hand.
No more acid tours of the Ransom Street Church, where Jesus had already waved goodbye.
(March 2023)
WISCONSIN WINTER, 1974
The darker the colder the more ominous the night passed.
The wind spit wreckage the path confused by spirits.
Each gust a scalpel a distant alarm brought home.
A huddled walk a stumble back a wind’s will distracts.
A car door opens to reveal her hiked skirt.
He offers her up I turn him down she sleeps on.
(May 2023)
ODE TO HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The quiet that leads to inspiration is found in a wedge of time when a dream holds your breathe for you between a tick and a tock as long as your yawn when you pause to collect sleep-dusty images that often lose their way while falling into the sound of your next in breathe competing with your hair scraping the coarse pillowcase creased and dented from the nocturnal battle of whim and will of sprites and memories and distance of desperation as silent as slow as the opening of an eye.
(June 2023)
BOB AND HARVEY IN GUS’S DINER, HUDSON AND N. MOORE STS., 1975
“It’s 10 already? What’ll it be?” “Two regulars, one light and sweet and one black, and three buttered rolls.”
“I didn’t hear a please.” “I never hear a thank you.”
“You always stir your coffee so slow?” “You always fill the silence?”
“Has Marty even called you?” “Look at us, look where we’re at.”
“Not good enough for you?” Gus says. “You talking’ to me?” Little Bob says.
“Now, that’s a line.” “Maybe Marty can use it.”
“Tell Frankie that he owes me from last week.” “Tell him yourself.”
“Whoa, there, young man.” “Another one for Marty.”
(September 2023)
WHENCE THE SCHADENFREUDE OF TOAST?
A two-slot toaster in front of three kids, I was happy to watch my sisters reach deep into the loaf, knowing the heel would be far more satisfying.
Such joy anticipating the coils’ first glow, with A pushing the knob to DARK and B’s fingertip over the CANCEL button, a daily standoff yielding nothing good.
Then the heel, deep in the heat of the second plunge, as radiant as an otter cub as the morning sun warms its small, soft belly while it bobs in the rippling wake of a canoe.
And as I watch their chosen slices crack and crumble to touch and teeth, the lowly heel becomes my tangible predicate to joy in the fractured frowns of A and B.
(December 2023)
RIGHT TURN
We were little boys failing at knot-tying and dropping flies. Few spoken words between us nerdy and invisible kids, who later adopted
Hunter S. Thompson as God before rebellion ended and we slid off into grey. Now the gun you carry lurks like a subtle dormant threat
and makes me doubt memories of our tacit, enduring bond, our shared recollections, and leaves me without a way back to you, to us, just lost.
There are no marksman badges in either of our attics. Maybe an outfielder’s glove. Were there ever talismans of half hitches and square knots?
(February 2024)
CRANK
My neighbor has the hood of his old Mustang raised. Crank it, he shouts to the kid behind the wheel. We all root for the starter, and fail, as I did by not cleaning the snake of years’ old muck soon after it unblocked a drain I neglected, so now it’s too stiff to crank, which is what she’s taken to calling me lately as I stand at the workbench of my shed sorting screws and nails into old cans and containers, muttering the names of friends who’ve passed and remembering the orderliness of their fathers’ garages.
(April 2024)
IN A BETTER PLACE
In a memorial forest not far from the Pacific cliffs, redwoods tower, shielding a creek that in winter nearly mutes the sound of wind moving through the trees.
Our guide walks easily among these trees, comfortable on the paths she knows well. She looks back but not to chide or spur us. “Listen,” she says, “and you’ll hear them speaking:”
“More people,” one sighs, “here to find their tree, their anchor to the future without them, their ash to be spread with dirt at our trunk, their voices transcribed into polished brass.
Soon their own senselessness will press against a future where they cannot see the buck standing tall and strong alone on the ridge, or the ferns that grow from the mossy ground.”
(May 2024)
NYC OPEN SPACE 143
It’s ironic, looking back, that there were no safety bars on any of the windows of Parkchester’s MetLife buildings. Restrictive covenants, yes.
But somehow my grandparents, with their blend-in faces and hardly traceable last name, got a sixth-floor lease from the insurance conglomerate.
Their windows looked out over Metropolitan Oval, a New York City green space with ancient graves and benches that served as an oasis
for the aged on their schlep to Woolworth’s or the Finast, gone now like the newsstand where grandma bought the papers every morning and her four
packs of Pall Mall coffin nails. Crossword pencil in her hand, cigs and coffee was breakfast because, she said, she couldn’t eat on an empty stomach.
(July 2024)
THE PAPER FORTUNE TELLER
The last time she touched my hand she was reaching for something else. She felt through her backpack to find the paper fortune teller she had folded on the train
that connected the home of her marriage to where she lived a separate life of work, a roommate and a lover. Each origami corner
was inscribed with a winking innuendo and with each random number I called out she made the boxes wriggle with those same glancing fingers.
Anticipation grew with each revelation, with each hint and playful allusion to what would never happen, to what could never happen.
(August 2024)
THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER
Yankee stadium rises en masse as Robert Merrill strides toward home plate. It’s Opening Day.
Merrill wanders alone in the dark outside his home. The anthem surrounds him like fog.
Outside the room where his son and friends gather, one muffles the Stratocaster aping Hendrix’s Woodstock national anthem.
Bob gazes at four bongs reeking on a shelf. The boys are too stoned to rise to the anthem. His silence menaces.
Old Yankees fans beam when they hear the national anthem and see, behind their eyes, Robert Merrill in pinstripes.
(October 2024)
SORTING
Boxes filled with might need, with can’t trash, with once so important. They’ve traveled with me — home to home, job to job — haunting me like a cold nearly never gone.
Some are filled with painter’s tape, unused rollers, tools and screws with once-singular purpose. Others with pictures and relics of commitment and tenderness remembered and misremembered.
Now that there will be no more moves, save one, I’ll clean the tools and put the words nearer to the shredder and sigh when the power button glows.
(January 2025)
THE UNBEARABLE BEAUTY OF BALLET
My 4th grade crush topped the In Memoriam list that passed from hand to hand around tables of 50th reunion revelers trapped in the land of lockers and unrequited love.
I got a pic of the list along with a text: “we’re still lucking out,” and closed my eyes to watch nine-year-old Pam and her sister pirouette across their living room floor.
An empty bus rolls past empty storefronts delivering dust to the curb instead of old people laden with packages and canes. The strength of fate overpowered their calm, wistful memories before those too became ghosts.
(April 2025)
FLOWER POWER, IN FOUR SCENES
The grown-ups leave bodega bouquets near the teddy bears and other plush animals propped up against sturdy candle wax tubes, all soon a tragic debris field of astonished plastic eyes crying over wilted petals.
Those of sufficient means or wearying distance scroll through images of arrangements organized by size, shape, and intended proximity — wreath stands, a floral coffin drape, a tasteful vase to be carried home with the grief.
Somewhere even today questions about corsage placement become urgent in the minds of prom bound boys, as they circle the mall parking lot with their mothers, whose own calendared day of obligatory appreciation proved disappointing.
Yet the pathos of the tribute flower — most silently present in my sister’s bedroom, with its rose patterned wallpaper right angled against a carpet of primrose buds never trod upon by a varsity lettered hero.
(May 2025)
UNLIKE CICADAS
Unlike the cicadas returning after seventeen years, ready to swarm and percuss in chorus, I shunned my acquaintances, sold the house and headed west to inhale the hope that sweetens the harshness of new starts.
Unlike those incurious cicadas, programmed by God to withstand the dampness of the dirt and emerge to take on the world — one where cicadas are symbols of certainty — I rolled a pair of American dice.
The droll croupier announces the roll’s number, as if there’s no role for surprise, unlike the cicadas that will crash into his windshield on his drive home while I’m halfway to the surf and sunset.
Someone tan built a sand Brian Wilson near the lifeguard station, carved it from pailsful of Pacific sand, shell and jetsam. Surfers bob atop swells, and unlike cicadas, share with me their resigned surly optimism.
(July 2025)
WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR DINNER?
We both know the revolving go-to menus. We agree on proteins with generous bonhomie. Yet every possibility unspoken, stifled by hesitation and begrudging mumbles that fill the silence — it’s all an exercise in wasting time.
That looping question wedged again between us, asked so often it sounds like a rusty can being kicked down the road. Its jangling recurrence once again forces your eyes to squint, my hands into fists.
Instead of considering the many recipes waylaid in kitchen drawers or Melissa Clark’s brilliance, we trap ourselves in mutual deference and our joint failure to inspire or surprise, and settle again for scrolling on Yelp.
(September 2025)
ODE TO FAULKNER’S ADDIE BUNDREN
Addie, are you William Faulkner’s Hester Prynne or Anne Carson’s Emily Brontë, who
“spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet … It gave her peace.”
“Sad stunted life, Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment And despair.”
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
“Why cast away the world away. For someone hooked up to Thou, The world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.”
I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say.
“On herself she had no pity.”
“Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart, pouring up the vents.”
My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin. I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.
I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right, even when he could not have known he was right any more than I could have known I was wrong.
*A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty.* Quotations Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay” Italics William Faulkner, from ITAL As I Lay Dying Asterisks Emily Brontë, from “The Prisoner”
The “Tao Te Ching”, roughly translated into The Book of the Way and of Virtue, is a Chinese classic text written around 400 BC and traditionally credited to the sage Laozi. The text’s authorship, date of composition and date of compilation are still debated.
It is a fundamental text for both philosophical and religious Taoism and strongly influenced other schools of Chinese philosophy and religion, including Legalism, Confucianism, and Chinese Buddhism, which was largely interpreted through the use of Taoist words and concepts.
When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created. When people see things as good, evil is created.
Rob S. Friedman 
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