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   I was in my sixties before I found out Billie the Brownie was really a girl!

And Before the Entrée   I watch the hostess pour a tablespoon of oil into the bottom of a wooden bowl explaining if you make the dressing in the bowl, you use less and the greens are covered more completely. She adds a couple of cloves of minced garlic and a pinch of salt and stirs;… Continue reading From the Kitchen of Susan

When I was a brush, a crude-tufted, rough brush, I pulled myself around the sky, painting mushroom clouds and streaks of fire. On the ground I spilled chemicals to burn the skin.  Today if I were a brush, I would be a fine sable brush and go to these cities and paint emergency medical stations… Continue reading Painting Hiroshima – August 6, 1945

By the Flower-Washing River on the western bank master of my house, I've chosen this quiet woods and riverbank outside the city, well away from business, dust, entanglements here where clear water rinses away a traveler's sadness too many dragonflies to count hover and play on the water two wood ducks swim straight toward me… Continue reading Coming Home

Leaving our departures behind, yesterday's sunlight is light I couldn't hold back, and throwing my heart into confusion, today's sunlight is light bringing tangled sorrows. Facing ten-thousand-mile winds, autumn geese leaving, we can still laugh and drink in this tower tonight, chant poems of Immortality Land, ancient word-bones. The clarity of Hsieh T'iao reappears here… Continue reading A Farewell Dinner for Shu Yun

Daylight brings a chill I can’t stop with covers My dead son’s picture

“It is as if you had been leaning against a door leading to a poem when suddenly it swings open letting you stumble directly into the heart of it…" - Lawrence Durrell - For a great look at three writers (Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Dylan Thomas) from the Norb Blei perspective, visit his Poetry… Continue reading Words Heavenly Orchestrated

I’ve decided to write about avocados today mainly because I want to discover what I know and think about this fruit that still seems foreign to me. To begin, it is impeccably colored a clear green or deep black-green with a slightly nubby skin. It is very delicate but once open, one must slam the… Continue reading Avocados

  My son and I share an apartment; he gets the master bedroom with its own bathroom. I get the kitchen. We have separated the living room into two sections for our separate chairs and cabinets of stuff! I believe my section is by far the neatest, he tends to disagree, of course. The other day… Continue reading My Fall From Grace