Lazarus
By Poetry Issue 91
What but poverty earned him your respect that when our fates were turned he is called to act as cruelly as I did then? Lot’s wife turned back in shock, in pity perhaps, and for this she was robbed of flesh and name. Why plant in us the startle and curious glance to countermand that…
Read MoreTo My Son Yacine
By Poetry Issue 91
My beloved son, I received your letter where you spoke to me like an adult told me all about how hard you studied at school and where I saw that your passion for learning chased all the darkness and ugliness away as you delved into the secrets of the big book of life You’re confident…
Read MoreTexas Blues
By Poetry Issue 91
Someone pulls a burning splinter from the devil’s thigh ————————————————& holds it up to the sun— August in Texas. And slides it down the frets to get the dying cicadas going, half wheeze & half-halted gospel hum, if it’s Blind Willie a hundred years ago, Blind Pilgrim born a stone’s throw from here, if it’s…
Read MoreThe Trick
By Poetry Issue 91
I’ve always loved that scene in The Seventh Seal where Jof, poor broke Jof the juggler, rushes back to tell his wife Mia that he’s just seen the virgin & child, so close to me that I could have touched her, but Mia is skeptical, wants to know what they’ll eat this winter, wants to…
Read MoreTwenty-Five Years of Fresh Air
By Poetry Issue 91
With no walls or ceiling to block it, the breeze shuffled my hair. I was chained, but to a comfortable chair on a single, electric boxcar that rolled through the world at thirty-five miles an hour. IVs kept me fed and watered and a catheter kept me clean. My jumpsuit, white at sentencing, splotched in…
Read MoreResurrection at Cookham
By Poetry Issue 91
Stanley Spencer, 1924–27 Cascading white roses! Their throne arbored shade’s —-“curious scent” Spencer recalled while painting. Those Seven Sisters perfume ——-my heart. God the Father’s broad: solid ————–as a Giotto Madonna, his curve-plane’s not ours. His hand’s in his son’s hair. Christ, free, in his white gown, cradles three babies, one naked, in folds of…
Read MoreStill Life with Fruits and Bread
By Poetry Issue 91
Pieter Claesz, 1641 Such an austere palette! Such an embarrassment. Such riches! —A flute of currant-red liquid, —-black and red currants in a silver bowl, rhyming red beads on the lacquered finish of the fork-and-knife set, a red —-and black string (the sole blood ——-coursing through this body, save a flush of the wall left…
Read MoreJam Jars
By Poetry Issue 91
In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics…only as a spectrum of possibilities. —Stephen Hawking Too often they kept on surfacing suddenly, stifling…
Read More[I strive to live as if…]
By Poetry Issue 91
I strive to live as if I were going to die tomorrow. The steady breathing of my sleeping wife, the taste of gherkin, the odor of soil and of dill, of smoke suspended over the fields, the sight of a couple necking on the dunes —that’s too much. They say that every day brings us…
Read MoreMerton Recites a Mantra
By Poetry Issue 91
Resurrection is the layout of keys on which I tap. Quite abstruse, this keyboard of thoughts. But I repeat it so often I almost have them beat. From one layer of the mind to the next to the furthest words leap, strands of idea return again as if a sink has clogged. Still by some…
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