More on: Poetry

after “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness” by Simon Wiesenthal I All day I’ve been beating my breast, begging pardon of those I’ve offended: family, estranged friends, and ex-dates. Cleaning the slate, the Rabbi calls it each erev Yom Kippur. I’ve even emailed that asshole out west with the broad-brim hat and…

Years ago somebody decided—I don’t know how this conclusion was reached—that the most beautiful phrase in the English language was cellar door. —Don DeLillo, interviewed in the Paris Review, 1993 i. cellar door / cellar door ———————–Two solid wooden doors hinged to open out leaning on a sloping ledge against the house. Within, a wooden…

Today I saw a man who looked away when he asked the clerk where he might find pepper- corn sauce in a packet. He held a muscled bit of stringy steak. Both man and meat had the gray look of shades swept from a cave. Sent to aisle three, the man wandered, head down, on…

I’m reading The Little Flower on the train out of London: a book that says we can only do small things with great attention. Next to me, a suited, stiletto-heeled commuter hides her title. But when she leaves for coffee, I look. Chapter one: Focus on your core genius now! Reject rejection! Sort out incompleteness—Now!…

Where only my scar line remains, a red rose blooms. Luscious, full, so open that if it dropped a single petal, it would not be as lovely as it is this very moment. My eyes watch through the rose’s flaming center, crimson, as if through a hundred desiring eyes— till the world prisms: quartz pink,…

grief and triumph were one and perennial, petals on the same rose, or the same rose by other names. —Kelly Cherry When Rachel was dying, and too weak any longer to sit up when visitors, crying, came to say their last goodbyes, she listened to her friend Deb’s prayers, whispered over the hospital bed. Then,…

Ya-Quddus One of the ninety-nine names of God Yours is the name of God that comes most easily to me— God holy, pure, perfect as geometry, that which is set apart. God to whom I pray, though I deserve no favors. And would you, Ya-Quddus, whom I simply call God, Lord, bargain with my heart…

Night shift on Rine #4 with three thousand feet of drill pipe churning Oklahoma rock, the mud pump’s wheeze and suck, hammer of warped deck plates beneath my boots as I gaze from the rig’s north end upon treeless, dust-bowl no man’s land. The moon slithers under clouds that go all sullen and spread a…

Little cherub, do you not fly? Or have you landed here in clothing of light To fool the eye? If I hear you in my heart Are you not alive? What I cannot touch I feel I cannot know And yet I know you are in my knowing If knowing is a body, does it…

Does your prayer cross the street? Or is it like the skin of the serpent Scratched against a stick or sharp stone? Does your prayer shred? Has your prayer Ever heard a man cry, or touched a woman’s fur? No prayer for the smashed teeth of Ai Wei Wei held against his will? I saw…