More on: Poetry

In the moment my father died, we did not want to spend Another dollar for the twenty-four hours He would no longer be living In the Willow Haven full-care facility. We lobbied the nurses to credit the last moment He breathed among us. It was four-thirty am, April 26, 2007. Who in their right mind…

Forty times a day the journey of a lifetime Was the forty feet to the john Then falling into your chaise lounge, Spent sprinter, deep sea diver. Your oxygen line trailed after the weekends I drove down to sit a day or two: In the helmet of each breath, In your eighty-year-old bubble, We swung…

Wasp, genus hymenopterae Hymenaeus, the god of weddings These days we gods are diminished things, black winged. I float like the infinitesimal hesitation, the unheard breath after I: “I wasp will.” “I wasp do.” I am the sadness shadowing the speeches of fathers: “Now she’s wasp elegant, wasp a woman.” I’m the one hovering over…

after Caravaggio Everyone loves figs. Imagine the Virgin imagining figs Paint the girl in your studio modeling Mary as she stares past your shoulder at a plate of sliced figs. Imagine the cherubs imagining figs. Imagine green, Capucine yellow, imagine mercurial vermilion in the black background of a body, see my oiled wing as the…

After I decided the spectacular sewer pipes planted with hens and chicks were too tacky to keep, I started to love those succulent single moms, also called common houseleek and long ago planted on thatched roofs to protect homes from lightning bolts. Stone rose, sacred to Jupiter in the south, Thor in the north, emblem…

Over many years, I have dreamed away my color and turned inside out, like the wet machinery of an orange. I’m all yard; the sycamores are my likeness.

Living in that wet belly was a long flight through driving rain, destination this thin river of a life made from petal, paper and some such flimsy stuff. Soul doesn’t need much to keep herself clean and combed, even if the body winds up a hobo or murderer, she knows how to make of herself…

Carpenter means Jesus—his hands to splinters, a bench to sand and rub smooth corners from the tree’s needle skin to build a boat. I want to follow Christ, but where? To a threshold—a place to marry, a pulpit where the preacher sweats, a precipice, the last land seen as others wave, that boat sails out,…

On a road that cuts through the richest, non-irrigated land in the nation, according to some Lancaster, PA, natives, a minivan slowed, and a woman with a good haircut yelled, Do you want a ride, or are you walking because you want to? I didn’t reply because my life felt so wrecked— no matter the…

Outside, the traffic stutters, some drivers blow their horns and the impulse bolts in dendrite-leaps from car to car. I’d like to think it’s the bellow of my stiff-necked Hebrews, shofars raised to lips, razing, man to man, the walls of Jericho to its stony knees. But it’s more how a monkey lopes— branch to…