More on: Poetry

—Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame. Black holes dissipate to God knows where, —Yet everything we’ve said and done remains —Like these lilies floating in this garden pool. Each name We’ve said, each paper lantern strung, each cross we’ll bear —In Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame —Yet floats forever here.…

Qui diceris Paraclitus (O Comforter, to Thee we cry) __________—“Veni, Creator Spiritus” Come at me, Comforter. I strain toward your inrushing arrow as it halves then halves then halves the distance that severs us. Till kingdom comes its Zeno-arrow lurches in time lapse, not still where it was, not yet in that place where it…

“There’s been a bloody murder out there.” J. points to the flung ring of feathers in the snow between houses, a bluish semitransparent sunkenness in the middle, a surprisingly beautiful swimming-pool color. I think swimming pool because at my age, I’ve learned to swim a decent crawl (I watched five YouTube videos for technique, how…

You can’t get away from pain, or your sister in pain, or the terrible wide doors of the handicap room. It will break your heart, the way she walks in the easy hotel pool, and then takes up her cane, to shuffle from chair to bed. We’ve picked two days halfway between our towns, to…

I am much comforted by ordinary things by the whalebone covers of my missal sadly worn and warmer to my hand than amber or by the cry of gulls greedy as pagans for the bread we throw on seas so troubled and so terrible I am amazed God made them except I stand upon a…

Three dreams and modernity appear in the scene, hand in hand with misgiving: November 10, 1619 A phantom touch and the soul folded on its lungs and dragged its good half leftward, heart over foot, wheezing and shamed. The phantom mouths blew around and blinded the soul and spun it on its foot like a…

If it happens, it must be by chance, the one bum note the slight misstep that leads toward an “ageless wisdom that outlasts all things else,” by which Augustine means his god and his god only, and not the Peavey amps, the wires coiled into a snare in the practice room adjoining a neighbor’s summer…

Walking the baby at noon along our vacation road I turned toward a lit hum animating old oaks ryegrass salvia thistle wild distance folding six white boxes’ uncountable pale thoughts measuring the air our foreign bodies nearly colliding but clearer, wouldn’t— not mine, hum I heard only when the baby slept against me. I was…

What we built to hold us, the year’s memory, menus and daytrips, after a while came loose. Those nights we balanced on each other’s mistakes, cradling our wine: twigs those branches now. Who knew what lived there? She she she called one bird. What lived there knew its place. Another bird splits its nest wide,…

Orphan or heir-apparent, did it plummet from heaven or work its way up through the fissures of the earth? Was it chipped from a dollhouse window or a diamond fjord? If the deepest bass virtuoso intones the nethermost D, will this sliver fly off to reunite with its source, setting off a flood of healing…