She sits on the rocks
in a demure bikini,
smiling up at me
from half a century ago.

Her smile says: it is
good to be 19, the whole
future an endless vista,
and the ferocious vigor
that makes up first love.

A sudden epiphany.

I am transported back
to that sliver of time.

A lifetime evaporates.

Not memory, but real Being.

I feel everything that was,
as if I am right there again
and no time has passed.

Aphrodite’s Smile knows
nothing of time. It is
eternal; spans centuries;
open to any willing heart.

Time is just a lie
we tell ourselves.

Beauty and Love
can never die.

— — — -

This poem is connected with a story I wrote. Read it at: https://bookgardener.medium.com/the-girl-who-knocked-a-drama-bbc89d3c4218

Death dropped by last night. I never expect him, but he was lonely and I was available.

What’s up, I asked.

Same old shit, he said. You have no idea how hard this job is. Absolutely no one wants to see me. Ever.

Must be lonely.

Lonely, he said, you can’t imagine! Most of them die as soon as they see me. Do you know hard that makes it to have a meaningful relationship? Or even get a date?

Death lit a cigarette, unafraid.

Oh, I can imagine.

Well, let me tell you; it’s damned frustrating. Sometimes, I’d just like…

He was six days home from war when she knocked on his door. He had been contemplating suicide. Sworn to secrecy by law and strange spooks with dead eyes, he couldn’t tell her that. Whatever wounds he had suffered were his to bear alone and would be for many years. Still, his world was so turned upside down by the madness he had just escaped that her unexpected arrival seemed appropriate.

San Francisco, 1972; not the halcyon hippie days, but the lull shortly thereafter. It was a good place to be, safe and cheap. Much better than upland Laos with…

Poetry,
like sex,
momentarily
destroys
the misery
of the world.
Like an
exquisite orgasm,
for an instant,
you disappear
into it,
released from
the mundane
now.

In America, a license and car represent freedom. That’s why young people can’t wait to get them and older people fear losing them.

I used to be a fearless driver. If I wanted to go, I just went: night or day, whatever weather, just a map (before GPS), little thought to the condition of my car, just hop in and go.

In the last five years that has been changing. I avoid driving at night or in bad weather. Even with GPS I am hesitant to go any where I haven’t been before. The list goes on and is growing.

…

History rarely repeats itself in the details, but sometimes events are amazingly parallel. Such is the case with the debacle currently ending in Afghanistan.

In 1955, we began to equip and train an army (and even an air force) to defend itself against “communist aggression.” Because our “poor little ally” needed time to prepare, we sent American soldiers, marines, and airmen to fight its war for it until it was ready.

This cost billions of (1969) dollars, 60,000 American dead, and 200,000 American wounded. It also began the Great Division of America which continues to this day.

In the end…

Many things have changed during my 70 years on earth. But for me, one of the most striking is the disappearance — in only one or two generations — of what might be called individual survival skills. Two generations ago these weren’t the provenance of specialists or preppers, they were spread across most of the American population, male and female.

At the end of WWII, if you had gone to any small town or city in the US and picked one hundred people at random, you would have found that most of them knew many things that enabled them to…

Happy Independence Day!

Today we gather together to stuff ourselves and celebrate the birth of a once great country that is now rotting from within; a country where willful ignorance, naked greed and the lust for power are the only remaining dominant virtues and the only measure of success is money.

The Founders understood the dangers of ignorance, greed, power and money. They were human and they were flawed, but they were not ignorant. …