Poetry

Cabin

Slate gray lake. Willows in a rough wind. On the far island, where     the shoreline is tattered with fallen trees, it is not yet spring. The waves won’t allow it. Won’t allow anyone to land there, let     alone to leave. Not today; maybe not for a long time to come. The bramble takes…

Rainy Sunday

His beautiful daughter was attending church. He sat with tea and limp tortilla chips watching the rain. Not feeling left in the lurch by things, but wondering at the odd ellipse. Surely she wasn’t enamored of the pale Galilean on the shore; —apocalypse yet further from her mind. She could inhale the fumes of fellowship…

The Relic

All the way home, I kept thinking of the lost finger of St. Teresa, displayed in the gift shop of a convent where she spent most of her life being thrown by the devil down the stairs or gripping the handrail after communion, so others wouldn’t see how it took all of her strength to…

Journey’s End

Johnson, Vermont Yet another metamorphic swimming hole, waterfall where language fails. Gneiss, schist, slate. You can hear nouns meta- morphose to verbs, gnarl, shiver, split, then strip down, tumble in granitic kettle-holes and camouflage themselves in green water, green because pines hang above the fault-line and shade language from blue-blank sky where some- body’s watching,…