End of Life Care

When I am an old woman

I will wait for a morning in winter

a morning in winter

when the sun is shining

a morning in winter

when the temperature

falls below zero

and the wind sings

through winter sere branches

When I am an old woman

I will sit among skeletal trees

in sub zero weather

I'll sit until I fall asleep

dreaming perhaps of

a toasty fire

or a turkey feast

skin on cooked to the crackle

biscuits inhumed in butter

pumpkin pie with a ginger snap crust

and sugared pecans shrouded in cream.

(Image: Winter Trees; Guido Frizzoni)

The night is still, the streets lie sleeping,
here is the house where my sweetheart lived;
long ago she left this town
yet here stands her house, on the same place.

And there stands a man, staring into the sky
who wrings his hands in violent grief.
I look into his face and shudder
as the moon reveals a reflection of my own.

You nemesis, my very double!
Why do you mimic the agony of a love
that lived in torment in this very house
so many nights, so long ago?
(Heinrich Heine, trans. Hoffman)


On the first night of the full moon, a man looks out of his window. The interplay between moonlight and moon shadow is so compelling he feels he must somehow become part of it. He steps out onto his porch, looks above him at the view through the leaves of an old maple. The broken light draws him in. He begins to walk, eyes on the moon, mind in contemplation of the exuberance he feels when he steps out of the fractured light peeking through leaves, buildings, alleyways, into the full face of the moon. As he walks he begins to feel invincible, larger than life. The moonlight infuses his veins, rays reach finger-like into his very core. He is become Nature and is filled with an overwhelming sense of luminescence and joy.

Time passes unheeded until some annoyance nags at the corner of his consciousness. He pushes it aside. Still it intrudes, overcomes the luminescence. Drawn out of his moon reverie, the man notices his surroundings. His old neighborhood…and across the rutted street, he sees the house of a former love. His infused light darkens; his feeling of elation dims; he realizes the presence of The Other.

The Other stands in the shadow of the house, baying at the moon. Out of curiosity, the man crosses over. He stands some distance from The Other and realizes that The Other is not baying at the moon, but rather sobbing, shouting, howling at empty windows, relating in his grief a tale of love and deceit.

The light of the moon is broken; its shards stab into the man’s own memories of this house. He turns to The Other. The eyes that greet him are his own; the keening voice, his own. The old brown suit he wore only because she had expressed admiration, the brown suit he had torn and thrown in the refuse bin when he realized her betrayal, here again in pristine newness.

And now the light has turned to anger, to rage, to revisited memories of deception, dreams broken, love betrayed. The man is overcome. He howls at the moon and the desolate house; he howls at the memory of lost love and still it is not enough. The rage bursts forth, renders him, splits him, emerges into an entity all its own…..

News Item: Early this morning another body was found in the Old River District. The police are quite perplexed as the body appears to have been mauled by a large animal. It is unlikely that such an animal is indigenous to this area. Police are advising avoidance of the area and are asking that anyone with information relating to this case step forward.
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Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert's Der Doppelgänger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKVnL9JvuO8

(Image: Adam Pieniazek)

The Coming of Winter










Day by day
a denser fog
envelops the core
edges overlap
outlines lack
acuity
meanwhile
the woman in the mirror
hides a shadow in her eyes
a reflection of the darkness
that lives within her mind.
She pricks her finger
I bleed.

(Image: John William Waterhouse; Boreas, 1902)

On Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature


Why is geometry always described as “cold” Wind blown clouds and “dry?" One reason lies in its Stretched into wisps inability to describe the shape of a Water filled cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, Sinking into mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, Penetration of nor does lightning travel in a straight line. More generally I claim that Mountain peaks many patterns of Nature are so irregular Sacred rite and fragmented, that compared with Euclid--a term Shrouded in a used in this work to denote all of standard Veil of fog geometry--Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity. The number of distinct Act of Nature scales and length of natural patterns is for all practical purposes infinite. The existence Climaxing in of these patterns challenges us to study these Lightning bolt patterns that Euclid leaves aside as being “formless,” to investigate Water birth the morphology of the Mountain streams “amorphous.” Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, Pines ferns and have increasingly chosen to Condensate waters warmed flee from nature by devising theories unrelated In sunlit glades to anything we can see or feel……at first glance such Evaporate rise misbehavior looks most bizarre and even terrifying….contrary to rumors Reborn in that analysis is a dry subject, these fractals Wind blown clouds tend to be astonishingly beautiful.

(Text: Mandelbrot; The Fractal Geometry of Nature)

Minuet










angels dancing
on the head of a pin
one step
forces another
silver surface
delicate feet
we watch
eyes held by amazement or
hope of mischance

toe dance shoes
add instability
probability unknown
and now the angels
take their bow
will it be final
or end in an arc of glory?

look there on the left
a bit of a wobble
and we wonder
which will be
the first to fall.

(Image: Fractals, julia set)

The Trickster of Seville

Quand Don Juan descendit vers l'onde souterraine

Et lorsqu'il eut donné son obole à Charon,

Un sombre mendiant, l'oeil fier comme Antisthène,

D'un bras vengeur et fort saisit chaque aviron....

(Baudelaire)

At his passing
Don Juan proffered
a subway token--
fare for the boatman
on the River Archeron.
The boatman accepted
with an enigmatic smile
and served the Don
no more than he had bought--
a bottle of cheap red
instead

of the glass

of Forgetting.
Don Juan offered thanks
and closed his eyes ---
willing the
the embrace of the fog.

Don Juan's hell
was a fine old wine
made bitter by the
reminiscence of
past loves discarded

the rue and regret
of too many roads taken

the realization that his life
held less substance than
the alchemic cloy
of a funerary rose.

Eternity to pay
for the passionate sadness
in Doña Ines' eyes
and a token given in jest
to the boatman
on the River Archeron.

(image: La Barca de Caronte, Eric Martin Contreras)

The Red Wheelbarrow--
William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens







Gone










nothing much depends
on a red wheelbarrow
fallen to rust in
the dust blown field

one thousand acres
of unsown wheat

abandoned barn
home to none but
the dry rattle of barn swallows
and the ghosts of American Gothic.


(Image: Steve Fitch, Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains, University of New Mexico Press, 2003)