When the door closes behind the Sheik Mai whips off her head covering, as do the other women, shaking loose their thick, black hair. Like nuns freed from their habits and coifs, they come to life, chatter like birds. –even the old grandmother tries her few words of English. I try my Arabic. After the … Continue reading →

Coleridge, scholar, was reading Spinoza, so when Walsh, reliable spy sent by the Home Office, quizzed locals, “Who? Why? tramping about? taking notes on the sly!” Coleridge found out and renamed him Spy Nozy. Suspicious “Sett of Violent Democrats gathered around Tom Poole, surely a gang,” Walsh reported. Poole’s and Coleridge’s names were known as … Continue reading →

When Abigail Alcott died, Louisa May and her father prepared to publish her journals- she of the grey cloak and unfashionable bonnet worn like her principles, the first paid social worker in America who reported to the rich benefactresses that she found the Irish immigrants dirty, ragged, hungry, that her investigation of causes showed that … Continue reading →

Thoreau found “incessant labor with the hands the best way to remove palaver from one’s style.” Borrowed an axe from Alcott to cut timbers for his cabin.   Alcott was more loquacious than sparrows, his prose prolongating as his rambles, random, thick as purple thistles on his farm. Thoreau felled enough trees, trimmed, barked, and notched … Continue reading →

The winter of 1851 was snug, tight, snow heaving its waves over Massachusetts. Melville awoke with a “sea-feeling…” The frost on his windows left only a small, clear glass in the middle. It was like “a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic.”   He wrote, “My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when … Continue reading →

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustic, flap their wings lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger. What danger on this island in the middle of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel the lift of wind under their iridescent wings, because they were born to fly because they have nothing else to do, because wind … Continue reading →

I remember their courageous laughter echoing down hospital corridors; I see Lila San Domingo after surgery, after radiation, more alive than my friends back home at school Snow fell soft and deep that winter – Shirley Byrd diminished daily as she watched it grow. Her mother never uttered the hard word leukemia.  Todd flirted with … Continue reading →