For him the truth is a flavor,a pulse made of nutriment,a living mountain of breath.Even pinched betweenthe fingers and released, he springsto perfect absence, beyond punishment,a celebrant of undetectable freedom.Cinder-speck, a vibrant fiend of punctuation,no bigger than a typesetter’ss
Poetry
Posted inPoetry
They Build a Hogan in Coal Canyon, Arizona
You must sit down and taste. —George Herbert That morning, Gilmore and Mary Francessacrificed a lamb for us. Gilmore said,With a cool hand,I slit the throat,the lamb did not suffer. We gathered around the lambskin-draped picnic table. Direct from the open fire,we ate everyt
Posted inPoetry
[Rooster, rooster]
Rooster, rooster,golden coxcombwait not for the sun to rise.Crow for Peterthrough the darkness,pity him who thrice denied. Rooster, rooster,Peter’s broken.Darkness shrouds all earthly scapes.Time to crow, foreven Petermay just yet be saved by shame.
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God Watching
I’d been thinking of the veinsOn the back of the hand: A photo I’d seen of a womanClutching her baby in Darfur;An old man, eyes closed,Palming his forehead on the metro;Ignatius in the painting claspingA crucifix to his chest—the veins blue,Raised like mole-runs In soft e
Posted inArts & Culture, Poetry
His Vision
I never saw the root of the realIn arboreal flare,Nor witnessed this man walk on water,Nor that one float in air. I sat beneath the bodhi tree;I felt my body itch.Between the true cup and the falseI knew not which was which. My eyes have never blown like fusesSparked black upon a wall,No s
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L’HEURE BLEUE
Hour of approach, hour of silence.The brother sets down his axe in the woods.The sister sets down her glasses on the tableand waits in the moment before prayerthat throbs from the tolling of the bell.Shadows swallow shadows in the frigid air.Hour of departure.Ledgers toted, windows shuttered.Late he
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Settlers’ Gravestones, Millersburg, Ohio
There is no poem like a gravestone,that tersely worded, lapidary tercet,the name, the numbers, and the R.I.P.that are the skeleton key to all biography.Some lie embedded, trapdoors in the grass,while others rear their monumentalcornices and angels, like cathedralswhere worms receive the body’s
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Mantis
A large cream colored mantiscaptured me todayby a wisp of my hairnear the nape of my neck. I flitted it like a leafthat fell from the aspen treebeneath which I read,not knowing the mystery that found me. Unfazedby my flitting, it regroupedto catch me againby the bridge of my glasses.
Posted inPoetry
November Requiem
Wood sways and mutters; palsied shutters bang.The call has come. Stripped of starlight, nightdwindles to gritty lavender and gray;mad jags of wind keep drowning out the surf.We dress, then slog through beach plums to the bay. Three days before, we calmed ten bottlenoses,then led an exodus into
