Poetry

  • Blanks for New Things

    She wondered how to make the new faithful to the original. Everything seemed so much itself, and already something else. Life became thicker and thicker over time. My fidelities to her and to the whole place became extremities of the same god. While she heard voices I was swooning, there was this seduction by the…

  • The Sacrifice

    We come to each other exactly at the center, the spine of ample fire, and suffer to be revised. Stay with me. Weren't we promised the sheer flame, bright change so clean even our clothes wouldn't smell of smoke, not one hair of our heads would be singed? Yet, just now, didn't the tongues slip…

  • This Hour and What Is Dead

    Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house? What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? His love for me feels like spilled water running…

  • Keeping the Song

    The laurel's green light keeping the song. Autumn, deer heard coming up the mountain. Six A.M. Seven points on one of them. Holy but out of luck, about to step out of time, about to meet its death on the mountainside in this rhyme. This isn't a poem about gunning a deer down. Nor is…

  • Improvisation No. 4

    Reservoir & Rapture The perpetual movement of our walking by a reservoir still moves me. It was this kind of place that brought the rapture, that shook down a star. I let a walnut crash against a radiator: thump, it shatters, & the wind runs up a knickered leg. How young the day is, younger…

  • Blind Man in the Morning

    “It's not August! It's not August!” the man cries through my sleep, the man with the closed eyes. I know, I know, it's April. Why call for the terrible bird of ripeness to descend? A cell will destroy you in the startling end. I'd like to know what I've inherited. I'd like to know what…

  • The Empty Set of Instructions

    One      The angels are sitting on their asses. Their wings      are clean. They do not bend to search the straw.      They do not think of finding anything buried in      the corner. Smooth, cold, white. None are related;      they are all angels. Who knows how much they      weigh? They do not care to mourn. They are…

  • The Spell

    And then a lighter sorrow sheltered me. For weeks I was under the cloak of an archon then I saw spring, and the spell was broken. Today the woodpeckers are nesting near the ridge. She—the big she—stays all morning in the lichen laurel waiting for them to approach her. She makes her call, “I-am-not-I-am-not” and…