pages turned to dust

Father Luke’s appeal is in the simple and truthful art of choosing words. He creates the skeleton of a world, and I like to visit it in part because I can fill it in.

I’m not very sensitized to poetry, just as I’m not sensitized to hip-hop or to a good cigar. I like his work because I can relate to the life it describes. Some of this is geographical: I know Santa Cruz – I can smell the eucalyptus in the morning fog, I can hear the Dipper rattle, I can see the light on the swells, thick with seaweed. I’ve seen the people who’ve washed up there, spoken to a couple. Santa Cruz is one of those eddies where folks find their wandering ends. Berkeley’s another.

But a lot of it is even more personal. His life, drifting and bemused, is similar to the one I lived on that other channel, you know, the one that comes in late at night in black and white: Some guy looks at what might have been – college, wife, kids, house, career – and decides what the hell, at least he did it his way, and dies old and poor and satisfied – and I’m the guy he might have been, touched by a ghost when the real world looked in on me, and I’m left wondering, what the hell was that?

Father Luke never looks at what might have been. He looks at what is, and says just enough to let us in but not enough to keep us out. That’s art.

More and more.