Ad Honorem (1)

For my dad's 60th birthday, I wrote a small chapbook, of sorts, and sent it to him from Costa Rica.  As he nears 70, I'm going to re-post some of its content, in his honor:

Of course, there is the struggle for existence in everything, and there is no other principle, everybody knows that, but still . . .

You live there, in Dostoevsky’s “but still . . .” In his ellipsis.

Around us the much discussed horror. The heavens’ silence & the mediocrity of its prophets. The dollar-lost. The harvests, in short, season after season, of grief. Nature strange with beauty. Rather like an eccentric philanthropist distributing riches as if intent upon a taunting inscrutability.

To live successfully requires a measure of violence. You hit a man in the face when you thought he’d endangered your child.

But still . . .

Along the top of our backyard wall a short gleaming coil of razor wire. Through the wire a tree covered with bright orange blossoms. Slowly the tree is losing its leaves; in a week or two I will write: Only the blossoms remain.

We know the score, right —to live!— but still . . .