In Passing book of poems (Grisaille Press, 2011). Available using PayPal or credit card. $9.99 plus $.99 shipping. 35 pages, 6 x 9 ".

Written over the course of a year, the poems of   "In Passing" capture details of daily life, small moments that pass by fleetingly.

The title is a play on words on one of India's most ancient forms of meditation, Vipassana , which means to see things as they really are.

Playful, questioning, "In Passing" focuses the same kind of attention.

____________________

The middle of the night.

Each branch of the apple tree outlined in white.

Is sleep a journey too?

Everyone knows how difficult it is.

Black hair tangled up in tangled thoughts.

***

So many white flakes!

Each one, whirling down, lost in its own path.

The river absorbs everything:

the drifts, rushing cars, the bridge's squat pylons...

Each snowflake, a weed-puff, touches

the front of your coat, dissolves...

How to start the long road home?

***

    Today the river flattens its glittery pages.

Dirty seagulls browse.

Where is it written that happiness must arrive

unannounced, a surprise

for only one person at a time?

***

The lake's ripples--TV static--

slosh against the dock.

In the gathering dark,

the growl of a lone motorboat.

A bat darts.

Now it has come to this:

at dawn to row across the lake, never

to be seen again.

***

How many small moments--

fleeting, bittersweet--

add up to what's called life.

The marbled clouds.

A bridge's rusty tattoo.

The impossibly long straight hair

of the girl in the next bus seat.

***

Night washes over you.

A freight train punches a hole in the dark.

All around, the city mutters

to itself:

a crazy person

to whom you're somehow related.