More on: Poetry

In high-school Latin, I first read Augustine and wary could not, even threatened by grades, be made to care for his florid rhetoric or thieving of pears. Uphill I trudge from the Antonine baths Augustine must have known. The basement remains where puddles reflect fallen columns, their leafy capitals upside down. A corner maquette under…

Hold up your palms to the darkness little one; be pierced with light. Come here for what, for irony and progeny, short years of rising up and passing on? As if there were an end to transience, as if it could ever pass for shelter or resting place. Reason is lost upon such reasonableness when…

The day Christ died a record-long freight train barreled through the Rollins Road crossing. For seven minutes tankers and lumber flats vibrated through the spikes in his wrists. A fisherman dropped his pole by the retention pond and headed toward the hill. A girl at a bus stop clutched her side as the embryo implanted…

Since I stole your money, Philemon, and even more, myself, the body that broke earth and stacked stones at daybreak while you slept, you have every right to lash me till the whites of my intestines show, brand FUG on my forehead, or throw me to the lions, who love especially the taste of escaped…

Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God…. —Isaiah 40:1-5 Until the day falls there is nothing I can say, my friend. Until the mountain kneels. He suffered so long in wordless suffering, a pain without wounds. May your brother, who belongs now to remember, be restored to light as wood is by ember.…

She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. In one of John Donne’s under-read hymns, on his sickness, he claims one place held Paradise and Calvary—Adam’s disgrace, too: over whose tree we choose…

“I didn’t get in trouble whenever I drank, but whenever I got in trouble I was drinking,” says Wayne. We’re sitting together with ten inmates in folding chairs. I like Wayne, I like his thinking, I even like his God and his prayers. The herd of Morgan horses in his pasture comes alive with light…

We planted the seeds in the spring And up they came innocuous as crabgrass. The tomatoes soon lorded over them, And even the jalapenos, sad lumps Hanging from their limbs like mittens From children playing in the snow. They stayed that way all summer, And before the frosts of November We pulled them up, declaring…

Go then into the spare light of dawn, Into the sparkling rime, from the long dream Of yes and no, stand still as the falcon passes Close behind and then in a rush of feathers Embraces the crooked pole and its power line; Go, believing in some destination, onto the shore Where destination founders, where…

The sea wind whispers and the tall oaks shake, their leaves shimmering in the August noon. And now the dry grass wrinkles and the floorboards flame. Saffron motes, a distant bird cry, this brackish sea. What was it you figured the wind might say? The oaks sway gently this way and that. Like young girls…