Poetry

V-necked, tobacco-colored cardigan pocked with tiny holes burned by embers of his cigarettes. He wore it when he’d flung off his collar in the sacristy. I believe he preferred the beauty of women to the virtue of sermons. I believe he preferred their beauty to giving absolution. A gift from his mother who favored him…

The silhouette of a mountain. Above it a dark halo of rain. Dusk’s light fading, holding on. He thinks he’s seen some visible trace of some absent thing. Knows he won’t talk about it, can’t. He arrives home to the small winter pleasures of a clothing tree, a hatrack, his heroine in a housedress saying…

Paestum, 1997 On an afternoon like this I want permission to forget the many varieties of cruelty. I want the only figures of the past to be ancestors of these wild poppies, of this chestnut tree whose blossoms break through the hardest wood. I know that cruelty flourishes just down the road, persistent as these…

John Clare wrote poems on scraps of paper, erased them with bread he ate afterwards. When he ran out of scraps he wrote in his hat. When he ran out of bread he ate grass.

after John Berger   When the beekeeper who lived in a cabin perched on the side of a mountain also a sketcher of rocks boulders and lone trees beaten sideways by wind was visited one night by the shepherd who lived in the valley he served him dinner the way Abraham hurried to greet the…

Cracked Sunday. Babble of backyard voices, witnessing over barbecue & open flame. Gulls cry above the peeling, fish-slicked decks of trawlers as if they have something to say besides hunger. I tell you these things, O Theophilus— so you will know the apostles when they come swollen-throated on the esplanade’s karaoke stand singing Volare, volare…

When Bodhidharma came from the West, for nine years he sat, face-to-wall. A student asked old Yang-chi, “What could this possibly mean?” “He was Indian,” Yang-chi replied with a grin, “he spoke no Chinese.” Chuang Tzu says, “If you follow dictates of an accomplished heart, then you have found a teacher. And who can fail…

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…

He was the yard dog’s yard dog. His heads accessorized with snakes. His tail a scorpion’s, and his slaver, a seed bank for Hell’s herbarium. And his bites were worse than his barks. What did he do in the underworld except to guard the stairs leading away from the bitter tide lap of the Styx?…