Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.

Hug
by Ron Padgett

The older I get, the more I like hugging, When I was little the
people hugging me were much larger. In their grasp I was a rag
doll. In adolescence, my body was too tense to relax for a hug.
Later, after the loss of virginity-which was anything but a
loss-the extreme proximity of the other person, the smell of
hair, the warmth of the skin, the sound of breathing in the
dark-these were mysterious and delectable. This hug had
two primary components: the anticipation of sex and the plea-
sure of intimacy, which itself is a combination of trust and
affection. It was this latter combination that came to character-
ize the hugging I have experienced only in recent years, a hug-
ging that knows no distinctions of gender or age. When this
kind of hug is mutual, for a moment the world is perfect the
way it is, and the tears we shed for it are perfect too. I guess it
is an embrace.

A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media:

"I locate the martini glasses, which had been used for fingerpaints, and I chill them, and I shake up the gin and vermouth in a pitcher of ice, and put on a Sinatra CD, and word gets around. The neighbors come over. They've been slaves to the brutal schedule of their children's social, educational, spiritual, recreational and therapeutic activities, with scarcely a free moment for themselves. 'How about it?' I say. 'Lock the little buggers in the laundry room and let's party. If they get put into foster care, so be it.' I pour us each a stiff drink and slap some beef on the grill, and we have ourselves a whee of a time. "

"It was on this day in 1893 that the verdict was announced in the trial of Lizzie Borden, who had been accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax. She was found not guilty."

Fathers day, 2006 or
What we believe but cannot prove.

Hours describe the circle
in one minute describe
the seconds in three
hundred sixty degrees.
Church equals marriage,
civil union for everyone else.
Horny is the flange of life.
Animals in commercials say what?
I hope to be alive to see what's next.
Twenty four years ago I yelped o'God
and twenty two ago I saw stars.
Now its me that wears purple.
Hey, Hey, Hey.

Off the Record
by Ronald Wallace

In the attic I find the notes
he kept in college
over forty years ago: Hooray
for Thanksgiving vacation! he wrote
in the margin of Psych 102.
And for a moment I can see him there,

feel the exuberance surge through
that odd cell of his body
where I am still
a secret code uncompleted, a piece
of DNA, some ancient star-stuff.
And then I find a recording of me

from 1948, when he was twenty-two
and I was three, and I can see,
from my perch up on his shoulders,
him stopping at the gaudy arcade,
plugging his lucky quarter into
the future where we'd always be.

Maybe imagination is just
a form of memory after all, locked
deep in the double helix of eternity.
Or maybe the past is but one more
phantasmagoric invention we use
to fool ourselves into someone else's shoes.

It is not my voice I want to hear
on memory's fading page, on imagination's disk.
It is my father's in the background
prompting me, doing his best
to stay off the record, his hushed
instructions vanishing in static."