my romantic tryst with cancer

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight, Out of the room that lets you feel secure. Infinity is open to your sight. Whoever you are. With eyes that have forgotten how to see From viewing things already too well-known, Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree And put it in the heavens: tall, alone. And you have made the world and all you see. It ripens like the words still in your mouth. And when at last you comprehend its truth, Then close your eyes and gently set it free. (After Rilke) - Dana Gioia

I found this on the seat beside me on the Queen Street streetcar on a night when my own heart felt broken. In the foggy depths of this brooding night, two strangers are hurting. Perhaps it is for the best. Perhaps of such sadness is poetry born. Perhaps in such wrought moments, people find  futures that are different from their presents. In such grief perhaps, is promise born... But perhaps, it could also have been very different. There is never enough love in this world for there to be too much. Perhaps they made it right. Perhaps they talked honestly, and with integrity. Perhaps two bodies lie together again tonight, making and being love, breathing each other in, legs locked, arms around each other. I will never know what that crumpled note was written about, or how or why I came to find it. Like so many things in life, that defy reason, that dare fate, this one does too. I just know that if I had to choose, I would take the second ending- that was about love, not loss- thou

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?  - Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems, 1992 Beacon Press, Boston, MA, Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver.

by Aaron Fogel Fellow compositors and pressworkers! I, Chief Printer Frank Steinman, having worked fifty- seven years at my trade, and served five years as president of the Holliston Printer's Council, being of sound mind though near death, leave this testimonial concerning the nature of printers' errors. First: I hold that all books and all printed matter have errors, obvious or no, and that these are their most significant moments, not to be tampered with by the vanity and folly of ignorant, academic textual editors. Second: I hold that there are three types of errors, in ascending order of importance: One: chance errors of the printer's trembling hand not to be corrected incautiously by foolish professors and other such rabble because trembling is part of divine creation itself. Two: silent, cool sabotage by the printer, the manual laborer whose protests have at times taken this historical form, covert interferences not to be

by Ted Kooser Today, from a distance, I saw you walking away, and without a sound the glittering face of a glacier slid into the sea. An ancient oak fell in the Cumberlands, holding only a handful of leaves, and an old woman scattering corn to her chickens looked up for an instant. At the other side of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times the size of our own sun exploded and vanished, leaving a small green spot on the astronomer's retina as he stood on the great open dome of my heart with no one to tell. from Solo: A Journal of Poetry, Premiere Issue, Spring 1996 Copyright 1996 by Ted Kooser .

I'm not sure where "home" really is any more.  I miss Toronto, and my life there, but on this trip back, like all the other trips I've taken over the past decade, I've slipped right back into where I left off when I left Mumbai all those years ago.  My friends are still my friends, my family as familial- everyone is just a little bit older, and some of them have procreated another generation to survive ours. I wonder sometimes whether I have a few more moves left in me...

This week's been different, promising... through calls, messages and memories, I've been reminded of how many people- family and friends I love all over the world. We've reminisced, giggled, talked, typed... These are relationship that have weathered time, and I hope they always will. We are but the lives we touch over the short span of history that we walk this world. I've always been amazed by the bonds and friendships my parents have built all over the world over their lives. I realise that my own are no less genuine and meaningful. "It's getting better, growing stronger". My friend Jane says there's a song for everything. I couldn't agree more as I hummed the lyrics I just added above, but I'll up that. There's a poem for everything too, often duly bastardised by yours truly... The words that come to mind, again, after I first read them in 1995 in Delft, as I steep in this lovely, present warmth... "and in passing leave beh