Prophecy-poem (for Micaela)

Twenty Eight Years From Now

When we will communicate only through plasma tablets

rippling across the palms of our hands

Mayla will hold her new daughter on her lap

(and that will remain unchanged, the soft very fleshness of flesh, and love)

and say look here, baby mine. This is your grandmother.

This is what she looked like young, and with the sun in her eyes

This is what she looked like when she married your grandfather

Lace, and her eyes crinkled when she was really, truly happy. I want you to notice that

This is the way your grandfather wrapped his hand around her waist,

an anchor she could feel

I want you to know that your grandmother was radiant as the truth

She was full of wounds but still standing on her feet

She made fire in the world, made it brighter

She asked God for a good life, and God loved her dearly,

and God did Her best to make it so

She loved me ferociously, simple as the sky, as complicated as a river

Are you ready, baby mine?

Have you been paying attention?

Let’s go see your grandmother

She’s been waiting for us

She’s ready.

Story Fragment (Comfort Dogs of War)

This doesn't really sing to me, so it's probably never going to be finished. But it's nice to know I'm  b still able to write.

I am healthy in body and mind, and I am filled with love for my wife and children. It is nearly after four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, in May, in Paris. The sky is dove gray and lovely as stone as I carry my plastic shopping bag to the nave. I have a letter, a bottle of good sparkling wine, a corkscrew, and a gun in the bag. 

They do not want me walking down this street, in May, in Paris.  My editor wants me to take a vacation; Roux is constantly forwarding me electronic mail missives of black sand beaches in Tahiti, craggy young mountain ranges in the Americas. Now only 1900 Euros!  they tell me in the bluest possible letters yelping from the screen of my processor. When I read these messages I feel an ache in my liver. All these people moving so fast across the earth and they don’t stop and they don’t pay attention to what matters.

I know what matters. It is a May day, in Paris. I had a good marriage, I did right by gods and France and my wife. I never touched a man with desire. It is a Tuesday and the tour groups are shiny faced and clutching brochures laughing at mother Notre Dame.  When did so many fucking people start coming here? In the years after the war, they didn’t come. When France was rebuilding herself ligament by ligament and the poppies grew in Flanders fields and we could’ve scraped money out of them like roe out of mackerel to rebuild the boulevards, they did not come. Now, here they are. In one hundred colors, a babbling cacophony of tongues and pollution. They tell me that acid rain is wearing down the carved saints of Notre Dame. Secretly, irrationally, I believe that it’s the sour scraping sound of these foreign languages eroding away at Mother Mary.  

I slip in to a back pew and cut the foil on my 1961 Chateau Margaux. Not a great year. Nothing like 1935. I drank a 1935 Chateau Margaux  when I was fifteen that caressed my balls like a lover.  People forget how soon after the war that was