More on: Poetry

I just couldn’t breathe in its shadow. It weighed what the cross weighed, that shadow Cross, more than any shadow should. No Sun could shoulder that kind of shadow, No man kneel there without a shudder. The dark beams crushed me flat as shadow, My flesh, grass, matted by the shade. No Way a mere…

_____What is truth That truth-telling is like theft Under your odd, local laws? Your own kind call you scofflaw. In fact, they prefer a thief. We don’t nail your type in Rome; Preach, and we just stroll past you _____And your truth. _____What is truth Anyway but a king thief Talking his way past the…

In all this wind I’m sure you’ll find something empty, an unsent package or the edge of a glass. Perhaps you’ll come back cradled, released to your barest parts. My emptiness loves yours. Can you hear it? As grace and distraction, our many selves bend in order to sing. You’d tell me the better to…

My better angel, my necessary, my made or my born, my homunculus, dwarf star, burning-ship swimmer, my opal and orb, my one truth abandoning or abandoned, long oxbow and pest, my socket and thread, locus and shift, my betrayed and betraying, my thief at the window, broken my bottle, my child gone hungry, room laced…

It is March; in Ireland daffodils will be suffering the harshest winds; here the coach had turned back from the slopes of the Beatitudes towards Tiberias; to the right the valleys, green and flush, rising to the hills; to the left, the lake, quietened in an evening lull and pleasuring; I settled in my seat,…

An old man was dying in the hospital, —-my friend the doctor told me. He was eighty-nine, his whole life a tailor in a shop —-below the room where he was born. He had no one, so a kind aide from Ghana —-sat with him, one hand in his the other holding her sandwich. The…

New York At noon precisely, just as the bells began to ring, the white peacock in the garden of Saint John the Divine spread its glorious tail, making a rippling many-splendored sound, like a sibilant wind rushing through many leaves. The tips of its feathers, shaped like tiny V’s, reminded me of doves descending, the…

All his lighthouses are self-portraits…. ————Jo Hopper on Edward Hopper   Darkness. Darkness & a wild crashing & smashing of waves on the rocks below. My light swinging round & round—shining for a split second on shards of rocky coast & a vast oily blackness ready to swallow small craft & large. I preside over…

Today                                       just today is a forgiveness exercise.               I try to live as though yesterday has no hold on me.                    …

The lyrics were appalling. Three little children lying in bed, two were sick an’ the other most dead and how the song, written by James Whitcomb Riley in racist dialect, became a minstrel song. Yet the bread itself was wonderful: cornmeal, flour, hot water, eggs, baking powder, milk, a good deal of shortening. My mother…