Inside this monument a rainit doesn’t want, coming bywith winds and the flag this way and that reaching outas if the war endedsmelling from all your letters home wet—they had to be wet, scentedwith thunder and kissesleft on the ground, already this harves
Poetry
(small places)
as a childI dreamed of small placessleeping in dresser drawershiding in cabinetsthinking about tunnels I loved the story of Moseshow he hid ina cleft in the rockbehind the hollowof God’s hand nowin the cityI lose myself in thoughtstanding on the subway platform wondering if I wo
As Eddie Fisher Catches Fire: For Elizabeth Taylor
As Eddie Fisher catches fire, diamonds draw flame;Scotch tumbles over rims like water in wellsPrecious stones ring; like each pearl string, eight grooms hung bells.Bows on blue-boxed Tiffany tongues thank your name;Mere mortals, fans all, clamor and glamour becomes one same:Celebrity, fashion, light
After This
We will live on a paved street or a roughAlley left between walls, almost forgotten,Or on the bank of a dry river bedWith rose petals running over jagged stone,Or we will live, naked as bees, in a patchworkForest stitched with water drawn from the sky’s groin.Sooner or later we will find ourse
A Rose
I bring you a rosewhich you yourself created!Did you create the roseso that I could bring it,or me, so that Iwould find a roseand bring it to you? So, I give myself and a rose.Thank you for the giftof roses which I give back,with my hands opening. I love your roses and you.Can you smell wh
On the New Physics
I/Blaise Pascal“The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me:The dark dissolves to numbered points and emptiness.I’ve tried to write of it, but the imploding blank Swallows what words I speak, absorbs the light I seek.I prayed. I knelt, but the rings round the plafond shr
If the environmental encyclical didn’t change your heart or mind, maybe poetry can.
Like Pope Francis, Oliver’s poetry invites readers to let the distractions of our modern, constant motion, hyper-stimulated world fall away from time to time, to enter into that quiet place of contemplation and gratitude that waits in the world all around us.
Ars Poetica, the Art Institute of Chicago
In this fine light the figurationsrise and dielike Attention and the senseand sensuous condition of paintand music God knows Degasknew the waltz of signs,the rhythms of cyan,the chant of the white lead, the Venetianred of The Rape,and the horses at Longchampswith their gorgeous rumpsposing for
