He watched this show on agriculture
and the interviewer is in the field
and the farmer says he can eat the

potato. “Really?” the guy asks on
script, gets a knife from the farmer,
slices off a nice piece and chows

down. The man remembers biting into
a big, old, russet potato when he
was a kid and going, “Yuck,” and

his mother saying, “Eddie, leave
those potatoes alone.” The farmer
tells the interviewer that there

are so many varieties of spuds that
some are gourmet eating as they are
right out of the ground as he had

just demonstrated. The interviewer
Hmm’s his acknowledgment and approv-
al while he continues chewing and

swallowing. The man wondered if it
might taste even better with salt.
He wouldn’t have been surprised

if the interviewer had pulled out
one of those disposable salt shakers
right on cue. With the man’s inter-

est perked, he made it over to the
purple fingerlings he and his wife
picked up at the farmer’s market,

cut a thin slice, salted it and
popped it in my mouth. “Hmm,” he
said approvingly and told my wife

it was a little like a starchy rad-
ish. She said, “Ed, leave those
potatoes alone.” Sometimes the

passing of time is as short, small
and simple as the difference be-
tween three, little letters.

Self-immolation, say, by a Buddhist monk, 
is one thing, even though I don’t get it, 
but what I do get, unfortunately, is 
immolation by another like 


what happened to the Jordanian pilot
at the hands of the terrorists. 
Heads hacked off, bodies 
burned alive…;

unfortunately, (There’s that word again.)
I get that. The Firestone Corporation 
kisses up to Charles Taylor, de
facto president of Liberia,

in order to keep the rubber bouncing
back to the U.S. and all over 
the world, while Charlie,
whose reign of 

terror was like giving a serial killer 
a country according to one 
ex-pat employee of 
Firestone,

put automatic rifles in the hands 
of little, bitty boys and told 
them to shoot to kill, 
while Charlie chopped

off hands and smashed testicles, 
and the same Firestone ex-pat 
employee cried, on camera, 
about the complicity.

I read a meditation about seeing 
divine Presence in everything. 
Terrorists and Charlie, too?
And if corporations 

are people, then seeing divine 
Presence in the Board Room?
It’s hard enough seeing 
anything human 

let alone divine in Charlie. The complicit 
corporation? Shame on the Supreme 
Court, whose members have that 
divine Presence.

Sometimes it’s easier to see the divine 
Presence in a rock.  I know, I know, 
Jesus, about loving enemies. It’s 
not easy following you.

Today he read about the Buddha saving a town
by drinking wine and then he read about some-
one turning all dry and prickly in the desert
and finally how catfish turned their heads
toward the sky in a bucket before they die,
and all that by one poet. Were they all metaphors,
he wondered. He doesn’t know. They weren’t similes
because there weren’t any words like like or as,
but he doesn’t know and it all seems so strange.
He has given up wine for a while, but when he
wasn’t on the wagon he doesn’t recall ever saving
a town simply by drinking some wine, but that doesn’t
mean that he didn’t. Perhaps he just doesn’t recall,
but he isn’t the Buddha, so he doesn’t think that
ever happened. However, he does recall endanger-
ing his marriage by drinking too much and becoming
dehydrated and prickly and pretty nasty like that
character in the desert in one of the poems, except
it didn’t say the character in the poem became pretty
nasty. That was the reader. Also, he and his son caught
a lot of catfish when they lived in Kentucky and he
can testify that the catfish really did curl in
the bucket with at least one eye looking up toward
the sky (the reason it was one eye was because all
the fish rolled over on one side) and it stayed
that way after they died, which was kind of weird
looking especially as the catfish looked up through
the water in the bucket which made the eyes look big-
ger than they really were. They were staring at the
man and his son accusingly like the man and his son
were killers which could be a simile (because of the
use of the word like) in something like an antiwar
poem, perhaps, if the man had written such a poem.

Don’t know for sure
about magic, wonder
and nature, but
when the nearly full moon
rises just after the sun sets,
both shrouded in clouds,
radiating light
you think magic
as you gape in wonder and
think about negative temperatures
and ponder why the sun
when it broke through
these clouds,
could not have its
golden beams iced onto
the blue of the lake and
why the dark shadows of
the tall trees would not
freeze in place giving us
pause to behold and remark.

Nature being what it is,
beautiful, mysterious and forceful,
has no fantasies
so you dream of
these possibilities and
bring them into the
relationship of what is.
The inland sea’s blue
is part of the color
of ice and snow,
while the gold is
very present in the sky
surrounding the veiled sun
and the black trees
with their shadows
are lit to brightness
by the moon’s
early February light.

This is mystical
with no mystery involved
or dreams needed.
The boardwalk is
like a painting on
a white canvas of snow.

The wind blows
just enough
to make us know
that this is real
and should be recorded.
These visuals,
though not rare,
are exciting and energizing.

We think
we have to come up
with something real
and creative just to show
that we can be
pretty marvelous ourselves,
but in reality
we know where all
the talent and wonder comes from,
so we stay content and
put our energy into shoveling
20-inch drifts of snow from
the driveway and sidewalk.

We listen now for music and
hear it blowing through the trees
and from the birds and
small animals chirping
excitedly about the food
they found where the wind
blew all the snow away
from the flora of the woods.

There are probably angels, too,
singing just because
they like the attitude
we have about
this state of enchantment.

Stansberry McKricken
February 3, 2015 ^

At the spa, a neighbor gave another
neighbor a fashion magazine which she
had finished reading or, more at it, look-
ing, dreaming, desiring, gawking, lusting,
coveting… all or none of the above, who
knows? Seriously, who cares? She did
ask when giving the gift, “When you have
finished, tear off the address and shred
it for me, would you? Can’t be too care-
ful these days.” Two handbags which
looked about the right size to carry most
things needed — $2,000 each. A pair of
clogs presumably for slogging slowly
along the plaza on the way to lunch at
the bistro or to the beach, perhaps, or
window shopping or all three before three
or just desiring to be seen or catching
one’s image reflected in a window or
every window — $2,000. Or life back at
the ranch with sufficient rooms so no one
really need interact, as the ad states
so affirmatively, assertively, comfortingly
in that baritone voice — priceless.

He and his wife haven’t gone to the
movies in years. The tickets are too
expensive and the cost of popcorn is
outrageous. But almost every evening
after he goes to bed and puts the mys-
tery down on the night stand, he enters
the cinema verite, the theatre of the
absurd or a moving abstract painting —
cubism gone crazy, stretched out and
elongated swirling in figure eights,
sometimes an Edward Munch painting.
In the morning, he usually remembers
and, with detailed accounts, tells his
patient wife. Sometimes, rarely, the
dream becomes a Danse Macabre poem.
Every once in a while during the night
he finds himself clutching a pillow
close to his chest to protect the
scarred heart. When he feels the ache
deep inside he knows the scar still has
a small opening out of which drips the
blood of lost love. It is then he sees
her, not an abstraction; she’s still
forty-nine and lovely. Awake, he hears
his wife breathing softly and the Choco-
late Lab rustling, the dog-tags jang-
ling as he shakes himself awake. The
man gently, lovingly pats his wife on
her butt. As he dresses, he remembers
that it is the anniversary of his late
wife’s birth. He motions to the dog and
closes the door behind them. He and the
dog head outside. When they return, he
will send his children, who are app-
roaching the age she was when she died,
a simple e-mail about the date of their
mother’s birth and how old she would
have been, not to remind them but to
let them know that he has not forgotten.
On each anniversary of her birth and
death he will do this. He will do this
on the morning after the night she appears
to him as he clutches the pillow close
to his scarred heart.