More on: Poetry

Lord, here I am again at the graveyard where I’ll be buried, but for now where I rest before walking back home. I like to lie with my back on the grass and study the clouds, a Constable imposter, or sit on my gravesite and look at this little village— the cemetery, seven old houses…

It is required you do awake your faith, Paulina says to Leontes, and these crows, spurting from the night’s silence into the gray before dawn’s rose, yell it in through my open window. I am slow to cooperate. O Lord, I owe you at least the modest diligence of looking carefully each day; so let…

My one-year-old grandson John has climbed up on the couch where I have been reading Updike, and, standing, looks out the window to the lilacs where a catbird spills itself in long bursts of toowees, cluks, whooits and meows and now he, too, finds his way to runs of throaty vowels and a comedic tumble…

Jesus—Joseph’s son. They would ask— Where is your home place? Your village? Your town-land? At the ends of the earth, the far yonder. And what, they would ask, do you do? Craftsman-laborer, poet-vagabond, carouser in the courts of God. Island. Jesus-of-grace, I, too, am island, from an island off an island, out by the edge…

Vigilante couchant on a pillow of air at hover in the Hopkins-eye; excess of fire, self-contained, prone to set the heather steppes ablaze: Rufus Raptor, of the falcon family, master of the chimney-stack, mistress of the house-sparrows flustering beneath in the gutter-dust; Prospero of the island, of moorland and coast, upland and down, power-bolt out…

  Weird magic, it seems now, a spell to believe in the candles crossed like swords across your neck for the feast of Saint Blaise— God preserve you, the priest intoned again and again. We stood in line, the whole school, as the white tapers were pressed against each neck to ward off sore throats,…

—-You were about to be missed forever when you took just like that. I can give you tight if you want tight. At you out here to the sides of the little dick you are are souls not yet impossible, not dreamt. Though the times of their wellsprings are how far upstream, you’re in their…

When I wander oblivious among the buildings I see future sacrifices emerge, I would like to adhere to some artifice, Rediscover hope through furniture shopping Or believe in Islam, feel a very gentle God Who would guide my feet, take me on holiday, I cannot forget that scent of departure Between our brusque words, our…

Evident duplicity of solitude. I see these old people seated around a table; there are at least ten of them. I could have fun counting them, but I am sure there are at least ten of them. And phwee! If only I could fly off to heaven, fly off to heaven straight away! —-As they…

Almost nothing happened and yet it is impossible to free —ourselves of the vertigo Something has begun to move, powers with which there is —no question of compromise, Like those of opium or Christ, the victims of love are —happy victims first of all And the life circulating in us this morning has just been…