Painted Toes and Other Mistakes

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These two groups of poems represent opposite ends of a life. Painted Toes and Other Mistakes was begun with the arrival of Covid in the spring of 2020, my seventy-eighth year. So You Bend Silk was completed in the national bicentennial year of 1976, the same year I finished So Glad I'm Glad I'm Glad, my first novel, and abandoned words for carpentry, then jazz. Forty-three years later, camped in an RV parked near Goliad, Texas, I began the rewrite of So Glad that had eluded me for decades. I also reverted to my old habit of fiddling with poetry as a warm-up exercise for writing sessions, and thus were born the thirty-eight poems that constitute Painted Toes. Looking back on the earlier poems I see a young man with his eyes on eternity and his heart wrapped in delusions. I am too close to the later collection for such a perspective, but I'd like to think that what I've lost in virility I've gained in humor and empathy for the everyday, that I've managed to conjoin the divine and the obscene in homage to my imminent appointment with the big nothing forever.