Poetry

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…

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-…

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 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…

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…

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…