week of October 8 - 14, 2007

A Man With No Teeth Serves Us Breakfast | I'd Like to Bake Your Goods | Stolen Mummies | Brendan Constantine is My Kind of Town
Up Liberty's Skirt | Feeding Holy Cats | Mowing Fargo | I'm a Jew, Are You? | Lizard King of the Laundromat | I Am My Own Orange County
Paris: It's The Cheese | Poetry Super Highway | Judaic Links | Rick's Bookmarks | Cobalt Poets
E-mail Rick | Other Cool Rick Stuff / Upcoming Readings | Who The Hell Is Rick

The Sea of Cortez The setting sun rains on the water. We sit in after-dinner beach chairs and watch pelicans dive for fish. They spiral down like kamikaze pilots with the engine cut, silent as knives. As night falls, the mangroves begin to hum and the water is warm as I rinse my dishes. We've got five days' worth of fresh water in brown barrels covered with blue tarps, but sea water is good enough to rinse dishes or to wipe sand from my feet or chili oil from my fingers. I pick bits of tamale from under my nails, little tamales they were, like baby's feet bundled in corn husks, masa and chicken. I bought them steaming from a kettle in back of a pickup truck that was parked by the Pemex station in Mulege. At the edge of the mangroves, mapaches make their nightly appearance. From behind the lush curtain, they creep onstage into the moonlight spot. Their agile paws and long nimble fingers clutch and tear at crabs' legs that click and wiggle. In this swamp where I spend my days, crayfish and prawns are rife. I swat flies, squat in the stream and burn matches on the bank. Among the tossed off shells left to dry in the sun, hermit crabs search for new homes and I wonder if crabs can see the burdens we carry on our backs. At 4:00 am, a light breeze whips the tent flaps and mists the canvas with a light spray of salt water and polish. As a dim light radiates from the east, I hear low whispers of whales calling down the shore. One day I will answer and my certain rumbling will reverberate through water and sand, from one island to the next, from one creature to another. One day I will answer in words that scatter the beaches like seashells and driftwood.

Dry bones in Minnesota You’d stand there arms crossed in front, gathering your waist with floured hands, a pause from oven to table, your silhouette perfectly framed in stained glass, staring out over potted pansies, eyes following the sagging line, a clothesline too close to ground, bird bath rimmed in chickadees, dry bones and brittle branches, skin cracked and peeling - old birch out back reminds you, your own sore dusted marrow. You’d bend to tender roses hand picked for you and he, now Grandpa’s Place, a place which claims my roots, in the yard out back among Queen Anne’s lace. Thinking back now - to earlier days of gathering; lilies-of-the-valley, Becky, little bells & cockleshells, kindling, and purple violets placed within your favorite vase upon the kitchen window shelf, with little purpose hands, where your tender gaze would rest oh Grandma how I miss you, and all of Braham’s nest.