Plum Estate Kamiedo

on this blistery day
all the branches
shiver ceaselessly
and the plum blossoms
they fall .....
they fall .....

glorious Spring

sneaks up on us..

Plum Estate: Kameido
by Hiroshige, 1857;
From "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo";
Woodblock print, 13 1/4 x 8 5/8 in; The Brooklyn Museum.

Detail of Background Plum Tree:

Obtained from WebMuseum:

Hiroshige, Ando.

Like manholes and poison bottles I was made to be self-locking and I could no longer be bothered pretending.

I might have a key ... I stopped trying to be normal and began to enjoy a small, still life that fitted very snugly around nobody but me.........

Pain and depression I found unpleasant companions but you must understand that what made them unendurable was hope.

That tension between my situation and my hopes for the better ... can eventually only do what tension does, it causes splits and tears, a degree of loss. ... And when the hoped-for future finally appears,

I would rather not see what it brings because hope has already robbed it, mortgaged it to the bone. ... for the rest of the time... I develop like a bonsai plant in a time-lapse video…truncated..

My own fate from whom,
I've never hoped for the good

Has with just heavens ruled,

If it's the impossible what I demand,
Its only because for me the possible is banned......

(from Don Quixote by Cervantes)

A Laugh: { The sound of } her fingers in his prespiring hair as he knelt in front of her

Of the buttons slipping out of braided hooks of her long coat.
The rustle of her skirt...... like the leafy edge of summer...... as she drew it up her thighs.

And when his tongue came home to her, from above his dizzied head and shoulders, that laugh again, distant at first, over arching, then closer than his own skin.

The hushed chime of her throaty laugh as he drank of her. The essence of her...

A note which left his soul singing and crazy with peace......

The Kiss....

It had happened some months ago and she had been alone with a drunken him, the wild side showing through like stormy weather.

He had kissed her in the dark water beneath the clear sky, their hair wet and entangled, and she had wanted him for so long it knocked the thoughts from her head and the strength from her body but she found herself pushing him away.

Her heart kicked inside her chest and she was sure he could hear it. She didn't want him like that, she wanted him to be all there and not riding a wave of alcohol induced lust.

That was the last time she had been alone with him in some months...


Later after the winter had come and gone, when the daffodils first nodded their heads in the sunshine, she had called him and went to his apartment.

Her heart beat a furious tattoo in her chest, as she pressed his door bell...

He opened the door and flashed his sly smile and invited her in.

But she could not read his looks and smiles as she once did.

Then he kissed her tenderly on her lips which had parted on their own violition, and this time she didn't push him away......

The screen door groans halfway throuh its swing as I open it, and above my head by the door frame I imagine hearing the ripping sound of spiderweb torn asunder.

Each night is the same; the spider builds in the evening and I rend in the night. Its constant duel of wits developing between the two of us. But I admire the tenacity of my foe.

I have seen the small black body dipping and rising, eight clever spindles twisting and drawing there in the space between the door and the screen, trailing the finest silk painstakingly and with serious intent. The shape of the web is a circular funnel of silver that reflects moonlight but looks dull grey in sunlight. Moths, mosquitoes, and mayflies attracted to the porch light in the evening end up as small grey shrouded husks discarded on the door jamb beyond the thresh-hold.

Something about a spider hidden in the door's corner feels like good luck.

Reminds me of the story of Robert The Bruce who re gained his reslove from looking at a spider re building its web.. but I have no kingdoms to conquer...


I stood on the porch until my bare feet tingled and my flesh felt chilled by the cool night air.
The dogs patrolled the corners of the lawn, noses to the ground and tails flagging high as they trotted. The grass bedewed shone in the light of the moon.

The vastness of the heavens stuns me; the spider web's intricacies intrigue me; the common elements of design despite the size and distance and the space between remains incomprehensibly mysterious.


Einstein said God is subtle. I believe him.

Reflections in the liquefactious layer of your eyes are something like a salty convex mirror of unshed tears...



My memories are sometimes like a short horse ride on a rough horse through thick bramble.
Nostrils distended, ears pinned back, sweat in a lather on the neck, the horse neighing and rearing up on its hind legs...

Tis a strange ride...


The space between, physical and temporal and emotional, provides no final answer, just a hollowness of silent echoes.


There are some things I don't even try to remember and wonder if someday I should,
or if all really is for nothing then why not remember nothing.

Then Nothing will reciprocate.... ..Nothing will mediate. Absolutely Nothing.

Where do those abandoned memories go, anyway?
They just lurk there below the surface to haunt and taunt....

I have been looking for questions instead of answers.
All the answers are the same as they have always been.
If all we believe is death then all we do is die.

The rest is vanity, and what does it profit? What shall it, O Prophet??

Magical dreams of love

Eyes closed and we sounded like the ocean, some big wave rolling in to churn the smooth pebbles.

It swelled and receded, swelled and receded, swelled and swelled and swelled and we moved together,

Finally it shattered with a ragged breath into particulates expanding out into the atmosphere.

We both felt that.

Surely such energy is not all lost to entropy.