More on: Poetry

–after Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia In the garden, all the apples have returned to us, dangling gold leaf shiny from the trees, and under their bowers we walk, our drowsy feet crushing the flowers, carnations, pinks, violas, dahlias— All of our dead have returned to us, their faces wrinkled with the labor of the…

Crows, like ghosts flocked in a field of asphodels, gather. They startle up in the air, drop like a length of chain. She could call their cold caws lamentation or laughter. It is hard to recall what she did not know Before she knelt here: the brayed past smudged from too much handling. (Was there…

Here—the terminus from which he begins. The road, tilted like a tipped-up tile, Points to those in trees pulling down branches. Wind rucks and buckles the cloak-covered path. Soon enough the day will be a ruin. Soon the crisp half-light of dusk will give way To the salt-light of stars, a gibbous moon. Although foretold,…

What I have come to say is never quite _____sufficient; what I have come to say falls ever short, if reliably—my one, _____my only certainty. This fact, for now, can prove both deep discouragement and deep, _____elusive hope. I’ve come to trust our words’ most modest crapshoot; I have come, as well, _____to see their…

I am hollowing a dwelling        in the granite of my heart. I am thinking then to torch       its walls, and sweep out all debris with a green, a heavy branch       of rosemary. I mean to chip a niche inside       therein to rest a…

1. One’s waking of itself obtains _____a rising and—one might say—a dazed, __________surprising glee at having met within sleep’s netherworld one’s own _____dim shadowed psyche, and survived. One’s walking soon thereafter well _____into the morning’s modest glare __________proves—if all goes swimmingly—yet further evidence of being _____obliquely well attended, proves discreetly provident of one’s _____invisible surround…

This, then, is the complete game: disappearance and return. ——————————————————————Freud [In craps, the “point” is a dice-cast that must be rolled again before a seven to win the bet. Seven, though, is the most common cast, so the odds always disfavor any repetition of the point.] I came to all the senses that would come…

What is this world but the absence of God, his withdrawal, his distance (which we call space), his waiting (which we call time), his footprint (which we call beauty)? God could only create the world by withdrawing from it (otherwise there would be nothing but God), or by remaining in the form of absence, hiddenness,…

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul, O I say now these are the Soul! —Walt Whitman By the second week in September nuthatches capture the last elderberries, excrement purpled and extravagant, sprayed drunkenly across my truck’s hood. I’ve been thinking about the God…

He is walking across a field of wheat in Kansas, grain as tall as his shoulder and as tan as his face. He is cupping his hands to his mouth, shouting words the wind steals and throws into the air like chaff. I need to know what he’s said and begin chasing his voice as…