Poetry

Go figure—it's a knitting performance every day, keeping body and clouds together, the sky grounded. Simulcast, ecumenical as everywhere, stay and hedge against the bet of bouffant space, you're the binding commitment so worlds won't split. Last week we had Thanksgiving. The post-cold warriors held a summit full of East-meets-West high hopes. Why not hold…

The dead are beyond caring. But Beatrice Is not beyond caring. She is not dead. She says to Death, “You are nothing to me.” She writes it down, “I won't stay.” “I'm not old.” “This necropolis is a disgrace.” “I don't know These people. And (besides) the country is cold.” Poland of Death! Our mother…

Gibbon, Tacitus, and Thucydides fished from a rowboat while it rained oysters. “Look,” said Tacitus, “it's pouring Rome's grief on my temple.” “No,” said Gibbon: “Phyllis has emigrated,” History takes correction from immaculate leopards who remain alive—but history retains nothing: it stuffs fact stew into its face, vomits, and gorges again, as the guitarist plays…

—So the soul had known it all along, the soul knew when it was taken: first it filled with light and then it went sideways, through boxes of radiance; you wanted her to look your way but she couldn't; for the bride can't just stop being the bride once the forward exit has begun, going…

Put corn on the stove, don't burn the chops, sign all letters “love,” keep spotless above, clean up what drops. Put all knives away, you never know. Car in the driveway, wait in the doorway, your prayer here below unanswered again: he has not died. This man of men throws good food in the sink,…

These poems and translations are part of a collaboration with the painter/monotypist Galen Garwood, with whom I collaborated on the book Passport (Broken Moon Press, 1989). Neither the poems nor the abstract images will function as “illustration,” but will interlock, exploring the fundamental wisdom-teaching rooted in the ideas of the great Northwest painter Morris Graves,…

She used to talk about divine laughter. I took this one of two ways. That the soul would be laughed at even in heaven, not kept out of the silver net exactly but as when the women at a school meeting laugh— at, not with—when they don't know how to enter your condition. But the…

Yes What awful thing will I take on because you've asked? I can't say no. Too hard to ask? It's only one more awful thing that I'll take on and do it all until it's gone, except the thing will never go. What awful thing will I take on because you've asked? I can't say…

Everything I steal, I give away. Once, in pines almost as tall as these, same crescent moon sliding gently by, I sat curled on my knees, smoking with a friend, sipping tea, swapping Coyote tales and lies. He said something to me about words, that each is a name, and that every name is God's….