Dorsey Templeton was a math teacher at my community college. He’d served in the 101st Airborne during the Korean War, gone to college under the GI Bill, and was an All State football player, on both sides of the ball. His heritage was Osage and Cherokee, and he never stopped teaching wherever he could about […]
My People Don’t Do That Read More »
When all the starlings, robins, jays Have given up and gone to nest, The crows refuse the calling night, Defer the final rest. Over the waiting conifers They improvise an arabesque, A final celebration to The dying fire in the West. Like fighter pilots when flight was new, Over the field they chase and dive,
The firestorm that swept a swath of Mount St. Helens clean left nothing alive. Nothing. Nothing but a pumice field, lifeless and dry as old bones, devoid of any sustenance. Within a year, though, within a year, life had begun again, insects blew in on the wind and died and left phosphorus enough for a
Fat Man’s replica, the big death’s first egg, is polished and buffed like a Jemez pot, and white. Ceiling white, though, not the white of a Jemez pot, not the white made from a special place in the surrounding earth. Little Boy is well named, inflated younger brother, olive as only the Army could interpret
Toward the end of the eighties, My closest, oldest friend Richard Bohle was informed he had lung cancer. I don’t know if the docs told him it was terminal, but he figured it was, and set about getting rid of as much stuff as he could and preparing to make his departure as easy for
In My Checkered Career, I wrote about some of the ways I discovered jazz – primarily through record stores and radio. But all through the 1950s, I listened mainly to the popular music of the day, both the residue made for adult audiences and rock&roll (very broadly defined) specifically aimed at the new Youth Market,
Liberace Meets Little Richard Read More »