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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]