The OrphanAGE, Vol. 1.41

First Lines

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
~ Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

It’s forty-some years now since I first came to understand just how much fun it is to cook a meal on the fly, to put down a couple bottles of ice-cold Pinot Grigio and to simply hang in a kitchen talking over whatever the world was hand-delivering that day.

The house in Brookside is long gone. On several occasions since, convening at her place outside Chapel Hill for a long weekend, or flying in to KC for a birthday, there have been soirees, notable for their echo of that first. Artsy evenings of music live in the living room. A fancy “potluck” right off the stove. I can still hear her voice from our last real brouhaha, carrying in from the entertainment: This is sooo bohemian! There will be no more such get-togethers — leastwise not for we two. But, and I’m certain that she would approve if not out-n-out insist, the tradition must carry on: new faces, more vino and its accompanying veritas, more evenings of music and art and talk.

Thumbing a photo album that came into my possession a few weeks back, I came across a collection of her paintings. Just a smattering of a rather significant portfolio. I thought you all might like to see a few. Thank ya Barb.

To find a fit to round out this issue was no easy matter. And so, we turn to a gentleman, a thrice-published memoirist, an iron worker, a postman and a fine poet with a recent release. It just so happens that his release party, in keeping with tradition, was a fine fete. Patrick does have a new book out on Spartan. You can order online or drop by Prospero’s and snag you one.

Peace,
Dante

In This Issue

• Painting by Barb Lambert
• Poetry by Patrick Dobson

Oil & Acrylic Painting by Barb Lambert

Poems by Patrick Dobson

Urania in Moonglow

“The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.” ~ Edwin Hubble
 
She made a potent Sputnik
when cosmic cocktails were
lunchtime entrées
 
She was two-nearby-galaxies-
and-a-quasar pretty
Urania in a club-waitress dress
 
It was youth, hers and mine
celestial phenomena
She knew the UAW aerospace proletarians
 
That’s what I liked best about her
strong, callused hands, robust calves
We caught constellations of bluegill
 
Too many Space Pops (sans maraschinos)
Too many black holes, interstellar voids
Too many jobs and bills and apartments
 
I think of her often at night
We are both old people now
Our universes retreating in Big Crunches
 
I look in the mirror and imagine
her looking in the mirror
into the Pillars of Creation

Three Compatriots
 

Three compatriots talk old movies
Out on the sidewalk under the neon
The music wasn’t as interesting
As Newman and Woodward
 
The world’s problems won’t be solved
Not tonight anyway, which is good
There’ll be plenty to keep us busy
The night falls gentle on the skin
 
Going to the theater was not a treat
But as regular as milk at breakfast
Those days are as close to us
As our failed marriages
 
Three compatriots together for the first time
Three decades have passed with our youths
Minor actors became big stars then died
We are no longer the men we could have been

The above poems appear in Patrick Dobson's collection A Successful Disaster (Spartan Press, 2026)