More on: Poetry

He blew harmonica and he was pretty good with that, but he wanted to play guitar.                             —Son House on Robert Johnson   In November, it’s hard to know a cherry tree is a cherry tree. If it has any leaves left, they’re raw as rust. The sound the wind makes hustling through them’s a…

Your eyes are a brocade of finches, feathered bronze and gold-flecked shards of stained glass, afloat in pails of morning’s milk. Your pupils are black as onyx, as distant stars moments beyond collapse. I enter through them to find, in a barn lit through rafters, the Son of Man with mud dripping from his hands.…

If you have no voice after reading Rumi     to a dying man you hardly know, this is a good and timely thing. Pay attention. If you’ve sworn to stay at the hospital     for two days, end up staying ten, you are the wind that rocks me forward. There are lights in the city…

Autumn came before I realized.                Sharpness flew up like gull-cries, the swan turned upside down in the water, pulling up grass,                rolling its big hips upward, which made me wonder if words are necessary for pleasure, if                without them, sparkles on the water would be useless baubles. I have so many of…

When he was only four, his mother spoke to him in Latin and a sacrament of Greek, the music of the dead tongues raised up to speak for the root of all. How proud they were, mother and son, bound by rule and the game it made, the bread they broke, word by word, on…

The sun turning to sackcloth means nothing to see here; all the sheeted corpses look the same. The moon surging with blood equals the deaths your butterfly wings effected while you slept. And the stars sizzling at your feet like Epsom salts are his way of saying you’ve lost your chances with time and space.…

You say you will never forsake us then send a horse the color of decaying flesh to wipe out a fourth of the earth. God does not will woe, the pastor says. Disaster unfolds from our own misdeeds. We sing, lift hands. The drummer kicks out mercy and grace. But I still see the horse…

You were born a swath of frost in the clover, nudged up on icicle legs. Now you cut through men like a derecho, sulfur and Sodom in your nostrils, entrails winding your hooves. I am trying to believe that God doesn’t will destruction, that out of love he allows our terrible freedoms to gallop across…

I chanted Lord’s river during Matins. The psalmist had written Lord’s forever. My mistake, of course, but I like my version better. Christ’s body of skinny, flowing, noisy water reminds me of the creek behind our house in Virginia. I felt him, playing as a boy in the woods. My brothers and I built forts, caught crawdads under…

The first afternoon in the monastery brings a brother to tell us to live into our gifts. Study that does not lead to prayer is dishonesty, he tells us. Too much studying is why we’re here. The dying monks chant Vespers, and two oxygen machines fill the silence of full breaths between psalm lines. One…