Creed in the Santa Ana Winds
By Poetry Issue 86
You believe He’s stronger than the desert wind butting against the fence, wind that ignites sagebrush, tears through the hills and strips the houses to ash. Despite your lips that crack till blood comes, skin that grows rough between your fingers, you believe He will be solid to your touch the way the bay is…
Read MoreCanticle of Want
By Poetry Issue 86
Lord of worn stone cliffs and the guileless trill of the canyon wren; Lord of stunted hemlocks, imperiled mussels, seeds that fall on shallow soil; Lord of boreal forests, of the fragile nitrogen cycle, of vanishing aquifers, spreading deserts; Lord of neglect and…
Read MoreThe Name of God
By Poetry Issue 60
Like a baker, swaddling the juice and heft of apples in pastry, I want my mouth to cradle the delicious name of God. Kissing the Torah, I breathe the dust that has lain on the name of God, imagine ink on my indrawn breath. I will dream myself into the body of a bee. I…
Read MoreThe Burned Butterfly
By Poetry Issue 60
Thus this restless little butterfly of the memory has its wings burned now and cannot fly. —Teresa of Avila Char my wings. Lord, singe these cells of forewing, hindwing. Blacken memory’s sky blue shimmer, its thousands of cells— each startling pigment, each dorsal and ventral venation— the coppered glint of flight, oh Lord. If prayer…
Read MoreMaking It Strange
By Essay Issue 61
The following four short sermons were delivered at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, between July 28 and August 2, 2008. All Manner of Travesties: Genesis 4:1-17 The hazards of the creative act are the loam out of which true form emerges. There is no way of achieving true form without opening…
Read MoreGrace Descending
By Poetry Issue 62
The sound of water over rocks is grace descending The sound of animals in the distance is the future coming toward us The sound of light sliding over light is God’s name being whispered to us The sound of a door swinging open on its hinges is our entrance into his garden There all sounds…
Read MoreSkin Boat
By Essay Issue 63
Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations The following essay is excerpted from a new book of the same title from Gaspereau Press (www.Gaspereau.com). TODAY I believe in God. A visiting friend and I were listening to a jazz trio one Sunday morning in an Anglican church. The trio led off with a…
Read MoreThoughts Without Order Concerning the Love of God
By Poetry Issue 68
The kingdom of my kitchen invites one snail to measure a carrot peel with the full length of her body. Of Christ and necessity this snail says nothing. The celery shines. By morning, my countertops, my floor will glisten with the star road of her meanderings. It measures a universe of dark and light in…
Read MoreSpontaneous
By Poetry Issue 72
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. ——————-—Stephen Hawking And so it has been accomplished, the way worms wriggle miraculously from a leftover cheese, rats from…
Read MoreSwitzerland
By Poetry Issue 71
The Eighth Day after Creation Then what a falling-off there was, unruly man, a violent God— when earth gave way, and rocks sprang up, volcanoes poured their fire down and mountains rose with jagged crags to form a world outside the plot. Though here today among the glaciered peaks pine stems still grow straight up…
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