Essays By Don Delo

By Don Delo September 1, 2017 Everyone should have a perch, a place where he can talk to himself without seeming deranged. My perch is on the eastern slope of Peter’s Valley in northern New Jersey on a cliff top that overlooks a stream, which meanders to the Delaware River, and empties into the Atlantic Ocean, where it is sucked into clouds that bring it back to the valley as rain.…

Don Delo Constantly risking absurdity…  — Lawrence Ferlinghetti   When I was a young Catholic, I thought I was praying to the Father, the Sun and the Holy Ghost. I religiously crawled out through a small attic window onto a mother-forbidden roof in Jersey City and watched God the Sun sink into the oily contamination of Newark Bay. When, while walking to school, I mentioned this habit to an older neighborhood boy, he punched me…

By Don Delo On an early, just-rising Sunday morning in the New Jersey woods, a deer just off the trail hides in plain sight by blending into her environment. I move, and she takes flight, disappearing into a thicket of mountain laurel. Ideas are like that. “We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brain,” I often said to my high school students, who were used to my “found…

By Don Delo I quietly opened the screen door, tiptoed behind the shed, and peeked around the corner. It was the second time I’d seen him in recent weeks. In the vague, pre-dawn half-light, this smallish, reddish, dog-like wildness was doing a cat-like death dance over a doomed vole. I live near the Jersey shore in an area still green enough for old oaks to compete with pines for the sun,…