Poetry

Chrysalis of shadows, we kneeled before it those long winter mornings to learn the tender fragility of shelter; match-stick tables, tiny mirrors smooth as the sea. Our hands were giants’ hands. We learned each walled-in space is like the heart: small doors leading to more doors, long hallways giving way to secret chambers; the mute,…

Hold fast to conscience and push deliberately towards self-mastery. — Seamus Heaney Upstairs in the high perch the strands of coallight discoursing over the house and cottage in County Wicklow the burial ruins temper the light of the skull shone on our heathen forebears, sunlight and periscoped floss of Catherine’s cries in the glen where…

(for Quincy Troupe) Harlem is on parade recalling St. Louis as if like us the whole scene has been transplanted here Sanford White’s window offers remnants of James Van derZee’s world it is filled with urgent gospels infecting us both with memories of our common birthplace I see you take notes always the poet but…

A thousand rocks grow smaller. The tide returns again and again. Eternal truths wash up on the shore hidden amongst the shells and fish bones. No man will ever find them. In small houses, the women wait, tying and untying black shawls around their shoulders black scarves around their heads. Birds do not come here….

For those who are neither hero of myth nor witness to history: remember all life is holy. In the year of the blizzard in the month of February I have traipsed up the middle of Lexington Avenue, a spectacular middle passage in the snow to my own poetry reading: James Wright, Philip Levine, each having…

From his travels, my grandfather used to send postcards. Among the pile of letters, they lay thin as turned leaves, their postage stamps shining with luminous moths and fish. The pictures always showed what he had seen: “This Persian rug was woven by girls your age. It’s the same shape as the floor of their…

You tell me you will be my true false bottom to my suitcase more luggage than anyone can carry. The snow falls easily at first as if it were meant to be as if it had no choice then harder as if it were leaving home. At home we watch the snow through windows of…

Let us those who have obliterated so many faces deny their own faces let us grant them no faces let us blot out their faces the sun eats the snow                        let time devour their faces let us look for the faces of those they killed who died faceless in the name of…

     How the coffin was not even carried by pall bearers but lamely rolled on wheels from the hears. Not even the weight of the body. Not that last presence felt by any other body. Alex in aluminum. Left out of the earth under the hired canvas pavilion on that plastic grass. One of the hinges…