More on: Poetry

from The Book of Brothers 1. In the book of brothers, only one is chosen, only he walks with father, servants trailing them, to a place that will be known when it is known, only he is given to ask of father, when they arrive, the offering, where is it? (And where, while this defining…

When they heard from his friend, the woman, that he’d escaped the cave, they’d already forgotten how Lazarus once had come out at his command, although they protested, fearing he’d bear some unholy perfume that would make fools of all who saw the miracle. That dead man, sweet as clean laundry, even ate some dinner,…

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…

Something whispered I wanted more of myself. That’s how I turned into the fleur of myself. The lake. The ripple’s shimmer. That lilting face. I’ll guzzle the infinite pour of myself. What is this flow I feel, its course through soft bone? The current? The mother lode? The ore of myself? Fill me with all…

I sometimes think back to my youth Remembering the heavy sack of sin on my shoulders And I bent double so it seemed Across the fields, with scarecrows hung on crosses, Along straight roads that led to nowhere, Weighed down in ditches, barns, the hollow trees I slept in; And how I searched like a…

Prayer means shedding of thoughts. ——————–—Evagrius Ponticus My heaven is a stripping of the mind. I make this glittering desert be a desert The burning rock, rock, blue sky just sky Until they are pristine; but then I find The desert leads me to its opposite Noise-vomiting Constantinople, And sky reminds me of the boundless…

An old Jewish tradition, dating back to the Talmud, records that the world is sustained by the presence of at least thirty-six tzaddikim. These people do their good deeds quietly: their neighbors do not know who they are. If, however, that minimum of truly saintly people does not exist, then the world itself will perish.…

Sound with the cries of Rachel’s children. Moan over empty hillsides and river runnels, among the broken stones of abandoned streets and fallen fences, through empty channels and sharp-ledged ravines resonant with echo. Rasp and rattle with the integrity of a perfect reckoning down the metal roof onto the splash pans of gutters, down the…

A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin black legs and their needle-nail toes across the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato. Although blind at night, she nevertheless fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry on one side of the path, links it to…

On an island in the disputed region of the Yellow Sea, blooms of smoke from the shelling of the garrison weave into one bloom, one force of nature so thick, they say, you cannot see your hands. The planet, we know, tilts on its axis like a man contemplating a problem, spun toward the horizon…