Journal

Daytime TV

August 28, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

So I’m watchin’ a program and the guy goes into a church and goes into the confessional, tells the priest that he hasn’t been to church in three years and ain’t that a sin? and the priest says yeah.Then he tells the priest he committed adultery. Ain’t that a big sin? he says? Yeah, the priest says.”Wait a second, you just got in here and you’ve already confessed to two sins. Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself? The guy shakes his head as if to clear away an annoying bug, jabs his arm froward, grabs his leg with one shaking hand, sits absolutely still, until his pant leg starts flapping like a loosened sail caught in sudden breeze. He let’s go, get’s up, walks out without a backward glance.

Note to my Editor

August 25, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I am swimming upstream in a river of fog, I am wrecked on shoals carved by indifferent time. The meds are having a fiesta with my sanity and my clarity. Possibly too, my vocabulary. Hopefully the re-write is useful and on target. The other draft read as if it had been written by a crew of monkeys in search of Hamlet in the original English.

Summer died today.

August 18, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

There is a chill inside the sunrise today, the air seems quieter as if beginning a long exhale which will end with the first snow. I bend to gather up small windfall branches. An unfamiliar ache seems to whisper, “Too soon. Be patient, old man, there is no need to hurry.”

Dreams

December 2, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

Bob Dylan once said that if “my thought dreams could be seen, they would probably put my head in a guillotine.” I know people who put their dreams on Facebook or better yet in group email lists meant for other purposes. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. If you see what I mean.

I read a poem the other day by a famous American poet. Didn’t understand damn near anything in it but for this: “If you cook like the way you walk, Chiquita, I will eat it down to the husk.” He said that right after he said that the substance of lack was the prime substance of desire. And then he mentioned that a child beggar in a South American village was looking up at him, pointing to his own mouth.

I remember my dreams. I still have them. To remind me, I suppose, of distances “which are not near,” places to which I drove myself until, for no good reason(as if there ever are “good” reasons) I was left with no choice but to leave. I now wake from my night dreams in fear of earlier guillotines and death dealing husks choked down in doorways of imagined Mexican chapels somewhere along the way. The substance of loss is the prime substance of salvation. Providing, of course, that you can keep it down.

Facing Up To It

August 30, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

“Endurance? You’ve only got to get out there and do it. Face up to it: Man was meant to run.” –Percy Cerutty. I am swimming upstream. Come the end of Summer, cool air, touch of Fall, the beginning of the end of things in this cycle, time to take stock, stock up, buy school supplies, bring on the next chapter. With age, my age, comes nostalgia and excitement sometimes in equal doses. Once I was sailing on Lake Superior when the mast broke a long way from shore. We drifted for hours, panicked a little, got it back together, caught a break with a shift in the wind and finally got back to shore the help of neighbor who had seen us drifting away. It had been Summer, lazy, easy and sweet when we set out and Fall, chill, gray and foreboding, the few hours later when we returned to shore. Yeah, we were meant to run, we are also meant to ‘get out there and do it” by whatever means available, every single day, age and weight and troubles notwithstanding, on account of the river waits for no salmon and time waits for no man.