A Tidings of Magpies

...when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations please note: photo from the Common Gettys Collection

the hookers, the madmen and the doomed By Charles Bukowski today at the track 2 or 3 days after the death of the jock came this voice over the speaker asking us all to stand and observe a few moments of silence. well, that's a tired formula and I don't like it but I do like silence. so we all stood: the hookers and the madmen and the doomed. I was set to be dis- pleased but then I looked up at the TV screen and there standing silently in the paddock waiting to mount up stood the other jocks along with the officials and the trainers: quiet and thinking of death and the one gone, they stood in a semi-circle the brave little men in boots and silks, the legions of death appeared and vanished, the sun blinked once I thought of love with its head ripped off still trying to sing and then the announcer said, thank you and we all went on about our busi...

may your arrows fly straight and your aim be true." please note: my photo at Spring Grove Cemetery, March 2015

By Jane Kenyon There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone. No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon. as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair. It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the bas...

Sin City by David Lehman Cynthia was feeling sinful in Cincinnati. She had changed her name once, which was a pity. She was looking for a new name, But not necessarily a new flame. Was there a sir to sin with? The evening was a blur to begin with. Came the first day of spring, and in the trees Birds sang, enacting one of life's mysteries. The wind played, and the clouds wandered like the lonely poet In Wordsworth's poem. Did she know it? What was the meaning of her laughter? That depends on if you're a son or a daughter. As the river south of the city flows, Cynthia reads the poems that name her, and glows.

Our girlie-girl was in New Orleans for the Final Four final game, but had another reason to be down there which involved a job interview. After weeks of crossing our fingers and lighting multiple Our Lady of Guadelupe candles--very concerned about job prospects and economic recovery--our girl found out she got the job. While she is busy packing up this weekend for her move next week, we are busy gathering bits and pieces here to exchange with her the things she won't need till she finds an apartment. Go down with a fold-up cot, come back with a backseat full of winter coats and sweaters. Sheer joy and excitement have been replaced with some nostalgia and a nod to Time who keeps truckin' on whether we are quite packed and ready or not. For a Daughter Gone Away by Brendan Galvin Today there’ve been moments the earth falters and almost goes off in those trails of smoke that resolve to flocks so far And small they elude my naming. Walking the Boston ...

Contentment by Michael Ryan Fragile, provisional, it comes unbidden as evening: the children on the block called in to dinner that for tonight is plentiful, as if it had cost nothing either in money or worry about money. Then evening deepens and the street turns silent. There may be disasters idling in driveways, and countless distresses sharpening, but all that matters most that must be done is done. please note: photo by Abu Emir

Well, there were some long nights here in CinCity as many of us early morning working folk here in town have attended schools recently playing in the Sweet Sixteen. The Bearcats were thrilled to have been asked to the dance, but a little too young to stay for the entire event. The Wildcats though...the health and prosperity of life on Earth as we know it depends all on them. Stay strong, men!    Old Men Playing Basketball by B. H. Fairchild The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love again with the pure geometry of curves, rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away. On the boards their hands and fingertips tremble in tense little prayers of reach and balance. Then, the grind of bone and socket, the caught breath, the sigh, the grunt of the body laboring to give birth to itself. In their toiling and grand sweeps, I wo...

by Gary Young In the heat of late afternoon, lightning streaks from a nearly cloudless sky to the top of the far mesa. At dusk, the whole south end of the valley blazes as the clouds turn incandescent with some distant strike. There is a constant congress here between the earth and the sky. This afternoon a thunderstorm crossed the valley. One moment the ground was dry, and the next there were torrents running down the hillsides and arroyos. A quarter-mile off I could see a downpour bouncing off the sage and the fine clay soil. I could see the rain approach, and then it hit, drenching me, and moved on. Ten minutes later I was dry. The rain comes from heaven, and we are cleansed by it. Suddenly the meaning of baptism is clear to me: you can begin again, and we are saved every day.

May those that love us, love us. And those that don’t love us, May God turn their hearts. And if he doesn’t turn their hearts, May he turn their ankles, So we’ll know them by their limping.

Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959 by William Matthews The less we paid, the more we climbed. Tendrils of smoke lazed just as high and hung there, blue, particulate, the opposite of dew. We saw the whole court from up there. Few girls had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt like me. Our heroes leapt and surged and looped and two nights out of three, like us, they'd lose. But "like us" is wrong: we had no result three nights out of three: so we had heroes. And "we" is wrong, for I knew none by name among that hazy company unless I brought her with me. This was loneliness with noise, unlike the kind I had at home with no clock running down, and mirrors.

Revival by Luci Shaw March. I am beginning to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost where the moles have nosed up their cold castings, and the ground cover in shadow under the cedars hasn't softened for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice around foliage and stem night by night, but as the light lengthens, preacher of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches, his large gestures beckon green out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting from the cotoneasters. A single bee finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow aconites glowing, low to the ground like little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up a purple hand here, there, as I stand on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat and light like a bud welcoming resurrection, and my hand up, too, ready to sign on for conversion.