Pleased to have a poem released on a strange and difficult day of beginnings and endings. This piece is ritualistic and I started it in a CA Conrad workshop, then “workshopped” it in Lynn Melnick’s 92Y workshop last fall/winter. It incorporates bits of the ritual into it. Does that make it meta-ritualistic? I don’t know, but the timing of events reinforces my feelings of a strange order in the cosmos even when it is not what I would like it to be. “Still Life with Cherry Tomatoes No. 1, Singing Bowl,” a poem about endings and renewal. May the doors open somewhere . . . and life and all its struggles obtain meaning through story (Akasha) and metaphor. All of it. The beautiful, the heartbreaking, and the opaque, mysterious, and labile.