More on: Poetry

One recalls the depths of shadow, / The uncertain elsewhere of each room, / Dust like stellar remnants drawn together.

Here flints / / sleep next to tinder, matches near the stove.

How many forms can the wind take? / A paper bag, a dying voice, a limping stray.

Star-eater, you said / nothing when I asked; / you couldn’t hear me / with my mouth pressed

I’m carrying into the cold / a bulging trash bag, big enough to hold / and hold and stretch and hold, like love itself, /
and outfitted with handy drawstrings.

Because nearing what one wants, / Our intellect is so overcome / That our memory is left behind.

were onto something, separating the good god / from all of this, but you’re so stubborn, you / insist on hanging dead in the web

Is it always necessary— / I think but do not say— / for the eyes of men / to penetrate the ways of the most high?

And so, emboldened by what the angel told them, / off they went toward Bethlehem to find / the swaddled babe and manger and lolling beasts, / their beauty and their beings ramified / in carols lightening our lamentations

We cannot see our loved ones, shut into hospitals / like mysterious shrines, taken out alive or dead. // They close our eyes. We have no say in whether / we breathe or not.