practical peace

How Things Change

For more stories, click “Essays and Stories”

I used to work Kelly temporaries. In the summer of 1992, I had an assignment in the engineering department of the pulp mill, where they made the brown paper that ends up as shopping bags. For decades they had gotten the pulp by grinding up trees, but with recycling and resistance to clear cutting, they were looking into using paper boxes, “old corrugated cardboard” is the technical term, as their source.

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Sestina for Jaime

For more poetry, click “Poems”

The woman and the boy look back at the years
They have spent together, at what she will leave: the river,
The Santiam that flows cold
From the mountains over its bed of rock
Into the wide Willamette, warm in the summer;
And the sound roof and sturdy walls of their house.

Now that they have more or less deserted this house—
He only sleeps in it; she plans to return in some years—

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Mindfulness

For all the practices, click “Practices”

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Lovelock Cave

I want—
my starved finger tips want—
to touch the clouds
in that November sky,

to mix, with the edge of my thumb,
Mars black and titanium white
in bright scallops and deep troughs
on stretched canvas,

to reach out my vermilioned brush
and note the canvasbacks’ descent
to rest among these reeds.

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