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Yep. She fell running across the open space.It wasn’t her fault. It’s just One more thing that happened. Knee bleeding,She wouldn’t get picked for the team. None of us understood, of course.We stood there, looking and looking. I’ve read that in this earth we bring forth windAs if soughing, that we are not our own…

At the funeral for the young manI’m trying to singthe complicated song And I’m running out ofbreaththere are too many Changes in directionin this song—some parts Are just for the choirthey sound greatup above in their loft Then the men singand that’s surprising—the women Are tentativewhen they singbut sweet The song is mostly about Jesuswho…

In the church, midweek at noon,there is a middle distancebetween the piercing bluewindow of pure beliefand the bone vault housingmy heart’s disbelief, a dimyielding distance relatedto my prayer: another day’sdelay before you are nowhere—for death fixes all distances                                like a new nail.

Near the end of the course, in that part of the hourReserved for questions, a silence fell on the classWhen the girl who’d been quiet all semesterRaised her hand to ask if anyone there besides herBelieved in heaven. An embarrassed silenceWhile each of us wondered why she hadn’t chosenTo go to the Bible college just…

Reminds me of early winter—field dressed, dangling from a porch girder like an upside-down garland of roses, no longer animal or drifting hole in a snow-blazed moor. How is it the body knows it deserves the ground before the clouds? The noose almost giving in? Suddenly thawed, dropped in its own shadow, held: un-mothered, sucked…

Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees,I think how I have taken a stranger’s life and whispered notso much as his name to the asphalt sky. How each year, on my mother’s birthday, I hear the warbled raspof his breathing and it pushes and draws me like a blues…