Poetry

Blue, and Calling

The blinds of midnight are your hands saved from freezing. Such is the heart, and that pause, the somber hollow beneath. Sweet prophet, I name you and your ancestors fidget. I say your temples spill with losses and your shadow bursts with laughing. I say morning thickens with peregrines, flowing soft above the waves, flowing…

Grave Tour

I was hoping for some contact with the natives, the ones who built these sepulchral impediments, an iron pianist whose music issues from a hole in the head, a broken column, a big marble ball. This is how they honor their dead even when the ground’s too frozen to make a dent, the fauna dependent…

Gnosticism

The teleology of what I now perceive. Contraction. Exile. The afternoon we paddled home in two canoes from the end of the lake, the sky programmatic and threatening, the seven of us eager to reenter the domestic space—the raindrops long as spoons, later the guinea pigs discovered huddled under the station wagon, the reformulation of…

Needle

Make room, said he to the haystack. The point is great; take that; your groom arrives. Lie back; spread grass; never a borrower be. Rakes groom, he said, fakes doom—though choosers don’t mind beggars. Said the haystack: It’s a wedding night, so I’ll keep one eye half shut. (Clothes do make the man, said the…

The Book of Sleep (XVIII)

You drove all night through thunderstorms, the PA turnpike slick and narrow in the passes. The tractor-trailers roaring, and sleep whistling past your ears . . . My heart was where a hundred roads         converged & then moved on         At one point you drove under a mountain. Later the sun unfolded over the…

Kings Go Forth

From here it looks like forgiveness, the possibility of a man: himself a meadow I traverse by sight, by feel, hand over hand across the green of him, eyelight by eyelight until I take him all in. Or is it just the front yard again, azaleas, hot pepper plants, and a stand of pampas grass…

The Liberal

Replace “snow” with “sparks” and see if the moral survives. Lie down and make a spark angel. Then replace “angel” with “angle” and see if morality survives. Our liberal society depends upon the difference of each flake and the capacity of the different flakes to form a drift. I looked down into my bowl of…