Poetry

  • The Soul as a Body

    There’s a body inside the body. It’s the form that rises up, immune to fire. It’s the kingdom of nothing as a body. High nothing! You see its shell in the mirror, draw back. Feel ashamed. It wakes in a dream and speaks in silence. Suffers names. What do you call it? The one as…

  • Thunder, Perfect Mind

    She would stand in that place where pilgrims and petitioners who craved God waited for her answers. Intermediary, she would pace as if chained to it: the division in mind. She was no go-between, finally. Look at it, she was Sophia or Ruah, she was hokhmah. Her shopping cart full of bird masks, low-watt light-…

  • The Snow Leopard of St. Louis

    Something bellowed. No one manned the zoo’s ticket window, only from somewhere came an echo, a cry lifted bodily over the fence. And there was the keeper’s little door at the back of a cage. The well-scrubbed floor, the animal just a furious blur. Next door a giraffe somehow stretched down to tongue the leaves…

  • Outside Monterey

    Outside Monterey the highway runs by the sea and the torch singer on the radio has a voice like twilight: “I couldn’t love you more, child, if time was running out . . .” My ten-year-old shaved his head when his mother left, looked oddly more adult last night, coloring the Stay Out sign for…

  • The Bolt-Struck Oak

    For they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.      —Hosea 8:7 I. Labor Theodore Thompson Genoways, born June 24, 1907 The midwife says, Bite this strop. Outside, burn-killed limbs— once spread wide as the province of God—pile in cords, sorted from kindling to cook-logs. Lynn tears muslin into even strips, watching Wallace through…

  • Landscape Mode

    Overlooking the Cumberland River, Clarksville, Tennessee, early November 1996   In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river, ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along, pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity of Hollywood…

  • Auspicious Things

    In a dream: a poem from the next century.          —Elias Canetti   Of the thirty-eight things listed, most are slight, would hardly register otherwise: an albino sifting through trash in an alley; cracks forming & widening between lakes of snow on a windshield; the foil from chewing gum. In the time of the thirteenth baktun,…

  • Mortal Thoughts

    More than your shirt I’m wearing. More than the wildflowers in the field. The purple will yield to yellow— when it turns red I will not be here to see it. This weight I feel is not the weight of your body. When I touch your skin I am trying to remember it— It is…

  • Ice Fishing

    From open water at the lake’s unfrozen outlet, steam rises, a scrim dim enough to turn the sun as round as a dime, though it’s still so bright across snow, so low in the sky it rings with a ball-peen clang behind his eyes, each time he looks up from his augured hole in the…