More on: Poetry

The black dog in the yard 
is darkness visible.  

In particular, a can of tomato paste 
which fits in my hand like a roll of bills. 

Not angels, but pale travelers
            through time, come back
Not to condemn or to reverse
            our narrow acts, 

But to remind us, by their soft
            disclosures, what
Is still to come.

In my paradise 

there would be a lot of liquids and could I bask  
unabashed in the breathing  
hammock of myself as a kind of Sweden  

for unrequited fleeing.

My God my God 

      why are you so far from     my groaning 

The trouble with language is the language:  
its lack, its want, its suffering—all the fire 
I have worshipped morning and evening. 

Took far too long to know I had stopped living  
and begun wearing my life instead.   

I hear these words in your voice no matter who says them, in the well-water smell of the basement, by the artificial tree you and she would one day put a sheet over, so you never had to take it down or put it up again.

Easter, I make myself space 
in a pew facing a pillar  
four feet wide, I’d say, gray,  
mottled, plastered countenance.

Everything close enough fades  

in the coming dark; what’s at a distance, 
gone.