sometimes late at night

I find myself wishing
there were no passive voice
(an odd wish, I know)

but I don’t care much
for a world where
things were said

mistakes were made
damage was done
lives were lost

as though the mistakes
made themselves
or the violence

happens without
perpetrators,
death without killers

too many years
teaching English
to sleep well

Peace,
Milton

sky blue

There is not a cloud in the sky on this fall morning in Durham. Here's where the sky took me.

sky blue
 
oh, they tell me of a home far beyond the skies . . .
oh, they tell me of an unclouded day

on this unclouded day the sky
is the color of heartache
same as the azure canopy
that sheltered us
that september morning
yes -- that one

though today may prove to be
one of unremarkable
catastrophe the sky
is unrelenting
in its invitation to see
that home is

not something beyond the blue
but here in this unclouded
day in this mix of joy and pain
 in shades of blue
that color our hearts
tell me of that home

Peace,
Milton

summer rain

the rain stopped
just before I woke up
and opened the back door
to find
fresh-washed sunshine
dustless leaves
and a brand new day
splashing barefoot
in the puddles

now I am out in the dark
so the dogs can make
one last circle
of a yard they know
by heart
so we can go to sleep
while a brand new night
soaks itself
into the soil

Peace,
Milton

memory

On an afternoon he will not remember
I watched a little boy follow his feet along
the brick walkway, caught in the cracks --
in the mystery of the moss and the
pull of the pattern on his eyes not yet

three feet off the ground. The sun
looked over his shoulder like a friend
as he stooped to touch -- to read
between the lines, to see a story
he would find only once and then forget.

I came home to hear the tales of those
who had swum and run and jumped most
all of their lives to get to their golden
moment -- one they would never lose:
they stood as if nothing mattered more.

Somewhere between podium and pavement
is where I walk, where I write my story,
sometimes seduced by winner-takes-all
and grateful for those sidewalk afternoons
I can remember for as long as they last.

Peace,
Milton

tonight would be a good night

for fireflies, while we sit in the dark
after another evening of almosts has
fallen all around us, all around us

for a walk, since the storm that was almost
a hurricane has done little more than
threaten to bring rain, to bring rain

to write a poem, you said as we walked
knowing it would do me good to search
for words in the dark, in the dark

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- There's a new recipe.

intermission

I had thirty minutes to kill so I wandered
through the mystery novels and how to books
until I found myself among the remainders

books on their last legs making one final
appeal to be something other than compost
words someone meant once upon a time

in between two volumes I cannot recall
I found last year’s Chinese horoscope and
bought it, hoping to find out what happened

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: much like any other day

Today is a day much like any other day.

In the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, this is the day in the middle. Most stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Our Easter story goes the opposite direction, in a way, starting with the ending and then moving to beginning again. Either way, Saturday is the day in the middle. Much like any other day.

This morning, I sat around a table at church with ten Pilgrims (as we call ourselves) who had come to walk the Stations of the Cross set up in our sanctuary by our wonderful pastoral intern, Kyle. The stations were both thoughtful and tactile, involving a number of our senses to get the full picture. Before we gathered to eat, we gathered in the sanctuary for prayer and Ginger asked me to sing “Were You There?” Our connection to the song goes back to our days in Winchester, Massachusetts when Jim, a wonderful man with an amazing voice used to close the Maundy Thursday service with the first two verses of the song (as I sang them this morning):

were you there when they crucified my lord?
were you there when they crucified my lord?
oh – sometimes it causes me to tremble tremble tremble
were you there when they crucified my lord?

were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
oh – sometimes it causes me to tremble tremble tremble . . .

He always stopped short of finishing the last verse and we left the service in darkness to go and wait for the ending to come. The question in the song is interesting because it begs to be answered. I don’t hear it as rhetorical. And the answer is, “No. I wasn’t there.” I try to get close, to learn, and to remember what has been passed down, but I was not there.

I am here in the in-between of Saturday afternoon, a day much like any other day.

And much like any other day, I have been mining for poems, which I believe to be why God created the Internet. I was looking for poems that spoke to the middle, to the unfinished, to living in the everyday. (I am also quoting excerpts; please follow the links to read them in their entirety.) I went first to an old friend, Stanley Kunitz. I actually met him at the one Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival I have been able to attend. It was a year or so before he died. “The Layers” is one of my favorite poems. The last part of it reads:

Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face,
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

In the wreckage of the Crucifixion, I love the call to live in the layers of grief and hope and not on the litter of what might have been. We are not yet done. As I continued mining, I found another Kunitz poem that was new to me called “Passing Through.” The closing lines read:

Maybe it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.

At the Waco Mammoth Site the other day we learned there were layers of mammoth bones, each one from a different cataclysmic flood event that drowned and buried the animals. The dust we borrow for our days has been handed down. Though we weren’t there when they crucified Jesus, those who walked with him have been turned into words that have resonated down the days through the passing of the Bread and the Cup, through the telling of the story, through the living of these days that are one much like the other. And so at breakfast this morning one of the women at the table began talking about the “Mary Magdalene Moments” she had had during the day, things that had made her stop and wonder, “I wonder if this is how Mary felt?”

We may not have been there, but we can find the feelings, the resonance, the continuity in the layers of life than make up our faith. One more poetic gem. James Galvin end his poem, “The Story of the End of the Story,” with these two lines:

Real events don't have endings,
Only the stories about them do.

We are five days away from marking six months since Reuben, my father-in-law, died yet his story is not over any more than our grief is complete. Though many years separate me from my days in Lusaka or Nairobi or Fort Worth or Boston or Winchester or Marshfield those stories don’t feel finished either. There have been endings, yes – and changes. And losses. Plenty of losses. But looking back on those days is more than an archaeological dig through bones of days gone by. Something still lives in those layers, something that gives greater significance to these days much like any other day, these days in the middle between endings and beginnings and beginnings again. I was not there when they crucified Jesus, or laid him in the tomb, or even when he rose up from the grave.

But I am here on this day, much like any other day.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: opening day

Ginger, Rachel, and I got up early to catch a flight from Love Field in Dallas back to Durham. The flight was fine, though the route required of us to stop in Austin and Nashville on the way. And all we did was stop. We never got off the plane. By the time we got to the house, it was around four o’clock and I had time to turn on the Opening Day game between the Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers. I started watching in the top of the ninth as the Sox came back from a 2-0 deficit to tie the game and raise my hopes. They went on to lose it in the bottom of the inning. I went on upstairs to change clothes and get ready for our Maundy Thursday service at church.

The Lenten road to Easter and Opening Day are intertwined rites of spring for baseball fans. Some years ago when I was serving as Associate Pastor of First Congregational Church of Hanover, Massachusetts we were beginning our morning worship on a Sunday that happened to mark the Red Sox opener when one of the men stood up with the hymnal open and said, “Here are the words we need for today” –

time like an ever rolling stream
bears all its sons away
they fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day

As one who finds deep meaning in the ritual of Communion as well as the game of baseball, I was grateful to also find a poem (poetry being the third member of my personal trinity, I suppose) that resonated.

Baseball
by Gail Mazur

(for John Limon)

The game of baseball is not a metaphor
and I know it’s not really life.
The chalky green diamond, the lovely
dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes
multiplying around the cities
are only neat playing fields.
Their structure is not the frame
of history carved out of forest,
that is not what I see on my ascent.

And down in the stadium,
the veteran catcher guiding the young
pitcher through the innings, the line
of concentration between them,
that delicate filament is not
like the way you are helping me,
only it reminds me when I strain
for analogies, the way a rookie strains
for perfection, and the veteran,
in his wisdom, seems to promise it,
it glows from his upheld glove,

and the man in front of me
in the grandstand, drinking banana
daiquiris from a thermos,
continuing through a whole dinner
to the aromatic cigar even as our team
is shut out, nearly hitless, he is
not like the farmer that Auden speaks
of in Breughel’s Icarus,
or the four inevitable woman-hating
drunkards, yelling, hugging
each other and moving up and down
continuously for more beer

and the young wife trying to understand
what a full count could be
to please her husband happy in
his old dreams, or the little boy
in the Yankees cap already nodding
off to sleep against his father,
program and popcorn memories
sliding into the future,
and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine,
screaming at the Yankee slugger
with wounded knees to break his leg

this is not a microcosm,
not even a slice of life

and the terrible slumps,
when the greatest hitter mysteriously
goes hitless for weeks, or
the pitcher’s stuff is all junk
who threw like a magician all last month,
or the days when our guys look
like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping
each other, then suddenly, the play
that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid
we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,
leaps into the air to catch a ball
that should have gone downtown,
and coming off the field is hugged
and bottom-slapped by the sudden
sorcerers, the winning team

the question of what makes a man
slump when his form, his eye,
his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t
like the bad luck that hounds us,
and his frustration in the games
not like our deep rage
for disappointing ourselves

the ball park is an artifact,
manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg”,
and the order of the ball game,
the firm structure with the mystery
of accidents always contained,
not the wild field we wander in,
where I’m trying to recite the rules,
to repeat the statistics of the game,
and the wind keeps carrying my words away

One thing can be said of both baseball and faith: if you make an error you can still come home.

Play ball. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: april fool

the prank pressed
deepest in my memory
is my frantic father
wrecking our breakfast
with warnings of an
elephant stampede

(it helped that we lived
in Africa at the time)

I could picture the
pachyderms pounding
their way to Lusaka
and was beginning
to feel the tremble
in the floor when

he smiled with his eyes
followed by a full-fledged
laugh that let the
elephants evaporate
into the vapor of
myth and memory

that april fool’s day
was the closest
they ever got to town
I have listened every
year since, thankful
my dad keeps laughing

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: finding finitude

On my first day of Spring Break, I worked in the garden pruning trees and pulling up weeds and then went with Ginger to a relatively new coffee shop, Straw Valley Café, to sip and read for awhile. We walked into a little coffee shop and found it opened up on a meandering puzzle of small gardens and patios that wrapped around a renovated farm house filled with cozy little rooms – all of it available for whomever needed a place to sit and read and think. It is a beautiful place. As is our custom, Ginger and I settled down in different parts of the place with our respective reads. I continued in Adam Frank’s About Time, which is a sweeping history of how our understanding of time got to where it is today. I read today about Copernicus and Galileo, among others. Of the Copernican concept of an heliocentric cosmos, as opposed to the Ptolemy’s geocentric one, Blank writes:

The difference in size [of the universe] between the Ptolemaic and Copernican models was startling. The heliocentric cosmos was at least four hundred thousand times bigger (in terms of volume0 than Ptolemy’s. This vast enlargement of the universe would be the first of many times that scientific astronomy would inflate the cosmos. With each step outward, humanity appeared to shrink in significance. (77)

One of the things Frank does well is navigate the creative tension between cosmology and daily life, for time matters to both. He continues a couple of paragraphs later:

But in a changing world new cosmologies were dangerous. There was a background of political, theological, and economic tumult that made debates over the Copernican universe flicker between metaphor and cosmic reality. Europe had been pushed off the center of the map with the discovery of the New World. The Vatican was being pushed aside as the sole arbiter of both earthly and divine power. And the Earth had been pushed aside to make room for a new cosmic architecture. (78)

“This is the motion of history,” I wrote in the space between the end of the sentence and the edge of the page. I suppose there are actually two motions that follow Frank’s ideas of cosmological time and daily time, one arc being that of human growth and evolution as we become more educated and technologically evolved, and the other – growing out of the first – being that of coming to terms with our diminishing importance in our ever-expanding universe. The more we learn, the more we are asked to come to terms with how small we actually are.

I thought of a poem I wrote almost a decade ago (now, old enough to be new again?) that I wrote in response to a billboard announcing the new planetarium at the Science Museum in Boston.

daily work

In the crush of afternoon traffic I sit
In an unending queue of cars, staring at the stoplight.
From my driver’s seat I can see the billboard:
“Come visit the new planetarium,
you tiny insignificant speck in the universe.”

When the signal changes, I cross the bridge
over river and railroad yard, turn left past
the donut shop, and park in front of my house.
Only my schnauzers notice because
they are home alone.

I have been hard at work in my daily orbit,
but I stopped no wars, saved no lives,
and I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning.
Today would be a good day to be Jimmy Stewart,
to have some angel show me I matter.

As I walk the puppies down to the river,
I wonder how many times have I come to the water
hoping to hear, “You are my beloved child.”
Instead, I stand in life’s rising current only to admit,
“I am not the one you were looking for.”

I stand in the stream of my existence,
between the banks of blessing and despair,
convinced that only messiahs matter,
that I have been called to change the world
and I have not done my job.

Yet, if I stack up the details of my life like
stones for an altar, I see I am one In the flow
of humanity, in the river of Love. I am a speck,
in God’s eyes, of some significance.
So say the schnauzers every time I come home.

Once upon a time, maybe even in the days of Copernicus and Galileo, the point of education was to learn everything, which is not an option in the world we live in. The best we can do is to learn how to learn, how to be open, how not to cling too tightly to what we know to be safe as we flicker between metaphor and cosmic reality. To learn, to truly grow in understanding is to lose power because it means coming to terms with our finitude, which has been the reality all along. Being willing to learn means being willing to let go of what we have held to be true so we can see the world with new eyes. As the world changes the truth will still find us, as it did Galileo and Luther and Gandhi and King, to name a few, and it will continue to remind us of the limitations of our perspective, our language, and even our theology.

As our view of time and most everything else changes as we find new material engagements, so was God changed by the material engagement of the Incarnation, which I don’t see as a unique crisis for God because I think change is fundamental to God’s nature. Or let me put it this way: in the same way that we feel the universe changes as we find the ways to see parts of it we have not seen before, so God “changes.” As we see galaxies far, far away, as we are drawn closer together in a world where white people aren’t the ones who matter most or straight people aren’t the only ones who are normal, we are called to come to terms with a God who is bigger than the Bible, bigger than our descriptions, bigger than most anything we can imagine, which is to say, a God who is the essence of creativity and change, the only kind of God who could blow the doors of the tomb and make the dry bones dance.

And that was just for starters.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: hey, white people

yeah, I’m talking to me
you, too – and anyone
who never had to worry
about being followed
stopped or accused
because of our skin
who never thought
twice about a hoodie
making us a threat
listen right now
we need to listen
don’t speak of
what the boy might
have done wrong
don’t explain
make excuses or
offer solutions
just listen
for a long time
we have much
yet to understand

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: question(s)

love is the opening door

love is what we came here for

no one can offer you more

do you know what I mean

have your eyes really seen

-- Lesley Duncan, “Love Song”

Lesley Duncan’s lyrics came back to find me today (I know the song because of Elton John’s cover on his Tumbleweed Connection record) partly because I went back to that disc since it is Elton’s birthday and mostly because of the way it felt to be a part of the bluegrass service we had today. (I wrote a little about it here.) Several of the songs were ones I sang at my father-in-law Reuben’s funeral because they were songs he loved; singing them today made the grief palpable in a way it had not been for awhile. We closed our service with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” which, after today’s service, I took to be a rhetorical question.

question(s)

why do I feel more at home here
when I sing this world is not my home?
why does singing about heaven
make me want to plant trees?
why don’t the gospels talk
about what Jesus liked to sing?
our lives go on as endless song . . .
how can I keep from singing?

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: chance of rain

when it rains like this
I wish for my old vinyl
records and the songs
that seep back into
my heart like water
into our basement

its something other
than mere melancholy
or even memory
the melodies have worn
rivers in my heart
whose beds grow dry

from time to time . . .
and then it rains words
and music – blossom
smile some sunshine
and I close my eyes
and sing along



Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: spice route

Last night as we were getting ready for the Cocoa Cinnamon tasting, Leon had a plastic bottle filled with sand from the Sahara he had brought home from time spent in Tunisia and Morocco. He poured some into a brass Turkish coffee pot and let us touch it. The sand was somehow fine and coarse at the same time and had a pinker hue than what I know as sand, bordering on rose. (Cue the Police: “Tea in the Sahara.”) At the same time, Areli was building little mounds of spices – cinnamon, cayenne, sea salt, hibiscus, curry, cacao nibs, raw cacao beans – for us to add to our Venezuelan drinking chocolate when they served it later in the evening. I sat the camera on the table at one end of board and took this picture. Here is where the picture took me.

spice route

something in the sand
shrinks me down to size
clothed in appropriate
insignificance I step into
the stories mounded up
in the spices on the board
in the middle of our table

standing in my dining room
I walk the stone streets
of Tunis and Marrakesh
surrounded by the laughter
and questions from the
caravan of friends and
adventurers sailing

around the room
tasting and talking
digesting dreams
inhaling hope
infusing our lives with
the trace minerals
of togetherness

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: plotting the resurrection

First Fig 

 

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

 

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

I have kept my practice of a Lenten journal now for many years. This, however, is the first year I have tried to write and work two jobs. As I was driving home tonight, I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig,” which is a favorite and it led me to the following words.

plotting the resurrection

I’m not one to wax
eloquent about the
virtue of burning
out though I feel a
flicker of resonance
with her candle in
the way neither my
daylight nor dark
hold much room for
rest it appears
I have given up
sleep for lent sleep
for lent perhaps
on easter morning
I can nap in the
empty tomb no
one will be there

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: bear with me

In my post yesterday I quoted from Bruce Springsteen’s keynote address at South-by- Southwest, which I would like to repeat:

The purity of human expression and experience is not confined – there’s no pure way of doing it; there’s just doing it . . . . At the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that is what’s valuable.

After seeing him in concert last night in Greensboro, I must report the man walks the walk (rocks the rock) as well as he talks the talk. At 62, the Boss shows no signs of slowing down or gives any indication that the point of his evening is to leave it all on the stage. If rock and roll were a religion, Bruce would be a Pentecostal evangelist. With his clarion call still ringing in my ears, I heard the music start all over again when I read this sentence in Art & Fear:

To make art is to sing with your human voice. (117)

May I offer a mash up, if you will? There’s no pure way of doing it, there’s just doing it; at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your faith that is what’s valuable. To make faith is to sing with your human voice.

Here is one of the reasons Jesus matters: he was fully human, which is to say being human is not a bad thing, not an evil thing, not a destructive thing. Being human is who we were made to be. Bruce sang, and a coliseum of voices along with him, of what it means to be resiliently human:

we are alive
and though our bones are alone here in the dark
our souls and spirits rise
to carry the fire and light the spark
to fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

The reason we all sang along, or at least one of them, is because he sings about the truth of life that lives amidst the contradictions and grief, of the light that shines indefatigably in the darkness. We are the dry bones singing and dancing. Every damn day. It is the melody of art and faith, our best song in our human voices, embracing the life we have been given to live. Back to Art and Fear -- Bayles and Orland close their book by saying:

In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot – and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice. (118)

I’m a quote ahead of myself. I need to back up a page or two to the set up for the paragraph you just read:

Answers are reassuring, but when you’re onto something really useful, it will probably take the form of a question. . . . Over the long run, the people with interesting answers are those who ask interesting questions. (112-113)

Not long after I re-read those words, I came across my friend Jimmy’s thoughts on his Facebook page this morning:

It didn't seem questions had much place in my faith tradition. I remember asking questions, but, there were always answers. Life is not a math challenge where all the numbers add up to a simple resolution. Neither are questions.

Jesus is the answer, says the old gospel song, backed up by all sorts of good intentions. No. Jesus asks the questions. Where are your accusers? Do you want to get well? Do you love me? Jesus calls us to embrace the uncertainty. Consider the lilies. Walk the second mile. Take care of the people who can’t take care of you in return. Love your enemies.

Oh – there’s one more thread in my tapestry: this line from Mary Oliver’s “Spring,” which graced the Writer’s Almanac today:

There is only one question
How to love the world.

Wait. That’s not fair. A good line from a great poem deserves to be seen in its natural habitat. Here’s the whole thing.

Somewhere
      a black bear
           has just risen from sleep
                and is staring

down the mountain.
     All night
          in the brisk and shallow restlessness
               of early spring

I think of her,
    her four black fists
        flicking the gravel,
               her tongue

like a red fire
    touching the grass,
        the cold water.
              There is only one question:

how to love this world.
    I think of her
        rising
               like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
    the silence
        of the trees.
              Whatever else

my life is
    with its poems
        and its music
             and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
    coming
       down the mountain,
            breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
    her white teeth,
       her wordlessness,
            her perfect love.

The fact that I went to Baylor notwithstanding, I love a good bear metaphor. And I’m back to Lyle, or at least his cover of Steve Fromholtz’s song:

some folks drive the bears out of the wilderness
some to see a bear would pay a fee
me I just bear up to my bewildered best
and some folks even seen the bear in me

Oliver’s bear comes lumbering out of hibernation into a world exploding with possibilities and dangers, callings and contradictions, reminding us we follow a similar trajectory: sometimes bewildered, sometimes uncertain, sometimes hungry, sometimes hopeful, and always called to love with all the force and fervor of a bear looking to break a winter’s fast or Bruce belting out the final chorus of “Born to Run.”

We are alive. And human. And are called to love the world: to relish the uncertainty, to dance in the dark, to make faith by singing in our human voice:

everybody has a hu-hu-hungry heart.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- Sic 'em, Bears.

lenten journal: perspective

when I walked outside this morning
there was enough moisture in the air
from last night’s thunderstorm
to make me feel close to the ocean
and aware of my place in the world

the lettuces that lived through
what passes for winter around here
have gone to flowering, a display
of well-deserved botanical arrogance
and I am aware of my place . . .

this evening I watched butterflies
dance among the spring weeds
that have started without me
and I picked two hands full of
kale to cook up for dinner

now the schnauzers are sleeping
in tandem, tired from our walk
and I am soon to follow suit
hoping for a dream of walking
down a long stretch of sand

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: reflection

there are days I lay awake
at night and wonder even
worry about what’s to come
because the future feels

like a past due account and
I have already spent my time
thinking about tomorrow
putting the tense in present

there are nights like this
when I fall asleep holding
on to the day like the last
bite of the meal we shared

where we passed our plates
like forgiveness and let
ourselves love and laugh
like the present were a gift

and we press our fingers
to get every last crumb
and thank God we were
made to be hungry

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: seasonings

If I still lived in Boston
I would see spring blooms
inside -- at the Flower Show –
here in Carolina the daffodils
are well into their parade
the peach tree has budded . . .
I like the feel of the sun
on my neck and, yes, I miss
the prospect of snow on
Easter Sunday Morning
followed by the flowers
Creation’s resonance to
God’s emphatic YES.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: admission

On February 5, 1989, I took Ginger to see Lyle Lovett at the Caravan of Dreams in downtown Fort Worth. The club was small and we sat on the front row. Tonight, I took Ginger to see Lyle Lovett for the twenty-third time in our twenty-three years together – and we sat on the front row. Lyle shared the stage for an acoustic evening of song swapping with John Hiatt. I have much to say about it, but not all tonight. This evening, I offer this poem.

admission

one of the things that has always made her smile
is my collection of ticket stubs stashed away
in random places around the house, remnants
of evenings spent listening and singing along.

they are torn paper portals of time travel
back to the night I was in the room when . . .
tokens of thanksgiving for the chance
to have been there when it happened –

the importance of a piece of paper
to remind me I am capable of tearing
open my heart and clearing my ears
to remember life is a live performance

Peace,
Milton