There are many things we don’t understand about others.  The face and body are there, but we can’t see the invisible footsteps left behind, the old heartbeats that have made them alive, soft and warm, troubled and happy, and we seldom have the time to spend solving the mystery of who they are.     

I’d taken a temporary job in the US to help settle Vietnamese boat people.  Normally I didn’t work in the US, but I’d made an exception.  My case load was about forty people.  Some were couples, frail and slow moving; there were families with young children; and then there were a handful of single people. 

My job was to get them placed in housing, set up bank accounts, enroll them in English classes, find them work, etc.  They’d all received small sums of money from the US government and private charities to make a start.  The…

He was worried about his daughter in that way of doing what I say, not what I do, and she had a life of her own and it was dangerous by his standards, nothing like the risks he had taken. She was an alcoholic, hardly ever drugs, which was a good thing, but she was a binge drinker. A bottle of vodka or maybe four or five bottles of wine, sometimes a few bottles of sake and then she would pass out. When she would call him in the throes of a drunk, she would cry and tell him she was an outcast. She didn’t fit into normal society. She saw the world in a different light. Pain was part of her sexual experience and afterward she would feel guilty and it all related to the way she had grown up as a child. The secret things that had happened.

That was how he liked it, the man who was generally unfriendly, except to the locals.

Now in Mexico, with a wife, dogs and a number of aliments, he felt anchored for the first time in a long time. A flame tree spread next door and a jacaranda tree painted purple in the garden and the bees flew low over the Rosio when the sun came out and heated the nectar. He had a maid and a doctor he trusted. Life at 9,000 feet often meant extreme UV radiation, but he never used sun screen. He didn’t have time.

There was a criminal, who sometimes sat on the park bench. He’d pretend to be waiting for a friend. Actually, he was more a drunk than a criminal and he kept a bottle of liquor in a bag and he would sip it until his eyes got glassy. Then he would…

My words look like half-burnt cake candles tossed into the alley, the cats ready to lick the bit of frosting, but the rain begins and takes the space, flattening ears and closing doors

Not a great beginning for a poem about suffering and despair, although the cats might have something to say, how they were cheated once again … what of the difference between suffering and despair … surely there is more pain with suffering, while despair is a luxury of far-off eyes … yet, they are sisters without love and we can tell them apart in our feelings

I overlooked celery for most of my life, but today I found it in all its glory, the stalks knew my name and they forgave me for floating in the seagrass, picking the flowers of the sea … and I found an old notebook, down there on the bottom of the…