Shrouded Shore: The Many Musings of Thom Singleton

  Tasteful Color What colossal cook prepared this melange of tree-top treats? In the canopies, colors of cherry, butter, burnt orange, salmon, and saffron. With maples red and delicious, oaks lemony yellow. And, backlit by the sun, leaves ablaze with the eye candy of autumn. A delectable delight for eyes tired of just salad green. 

  Old Growth They sprout from the seed. They grow up strong. They put down roots. They weather what comes. They give of their fruits. They bear new life. They grow to maturity. They become old growth. What species of tree are they? Homo sapiens.

  The Sailor Reads the Wind The sailor reads what the wind writes. In his eye, cat’s paws crawl across the water, boats at anchor swing into the wind, tell-tales, ribbons in his rigging, flutter in the breeze. On his face, the wind traces its direction, as he turns side-to-side. The wind can be capricious, though. And so the sailor lives in the moment, himself breathing with the breath of wind, ready to trim the sails to best catch its gusty puffs.      

  Water Ripples and swirls and swells and whirls Babbles and bursts and gurgles and gushes Drenches and dribbles and drips and drizzles Springs and sprinkles and sprays and trickles Seeps and weeps and squalls and surges Spurts and soaks and streams and spindrifts Runs and rushes and rips and roars Falls and floods and fogs and flows It’s even the prism of rainbows

  Pandemic Introspection      To find your voice, identify the needs of others and represent them.                                                                                                  Yoyo Ma To follow his advice, I’d have to look beyond my own little world of pandemic woes, and get into the needs of others. To do that in isolation, I need to be emotionally genuine myself in my writing. If I am so, I open up a place in the heart to which my readers might relate. My honesty might help them identify and express their own emotions in this time of fear and sorrow.  Scarey? Yes. Worth it? You bet!

  Come Again???      A quiz: Which of the long words are for real?  It’s a tremendiously gorgemous day!  The sun is shining most beautifulissly. The sky is the bluiest it has ever been. It hangs there both in its verticularity, and in the expansivity of its horizontation. Its mysteriosity is in the problematicontrarian situationality of how it got so bluey. Its bluiness is oblivionissily in the visuality of one’s ocular organs.      Translation: Nice day. Sun’s out. Blue sky. High and wide. How so? It’s in your eye.