More on: Poetry

i. I was circling in a dry cistern pit, when I asked the Spirit to gamble on me. What were the chances, half-in and half-out, that I’d answer the ad in the paper? ———————Tossed in the box by the phone, it waited. Shame makes a hornets’ nest deep in the body. I’d lost twenty years…

I. – He must have hopped. How else could he have come —–out, as they tell us, with his hands and feet —–bound? and the loud voice ordering the winding-sheet —–to be dismantled, and the residuum —–of grief being wiped away? We live with this —–clown of a body, Brother Ass. We wipe —–the faeces…

                                in the Congo basin Children crack palm nuts milked of fats, stripped of orange. They smack nuts on rocks, split out the kernel of ndika, chew the smooth flesh and spit a festive spray of whitest white, ———like the…

and no sooner had the eaves of my eyelids drunk deep of that water than to me it seemed it had made its length into a circle. ––Paradiso XXX.88–90 I. In what now is Beaudry Park, West of the Forks, the Assiniboine is not so brown and muddy you can’t see upside-down elms, shifting in…

In the immediate vicinity of death, the mind enters on an unaccustomed order of sensations, a region untrodden before, from which few,very few travelers have returned…Here…the pilgrim pursues his course alone, and is lost to our eye. —————————–—Bishop George Burgess, 1850 I have watched the horse, the roan, turned loose, graze side by side with…

—————————–“The real aim is not to see God —————————–in all things, it is that God, through us, —————————–should see the things that we see.” —————————–– Simone Weil Daybreak the bones of dream break the light Breakfast spoons lifted from the drain board to spend time in the yogurt bowl beside the plate of steaming scones…

Matthew 4:1–11 Leather-winged I wheel over dunes. Dimpled crests resemble rippled seabed sand. Peering through the centuries I witness future blots: rusted armour, helicopter husk, sphincters in the dirt where mines blew out. Striations made by scream. But now a figure clarifies from distant shimmer-heat. What myth do you believe? In one, I was the…

Attention truncated yields torture. The saints’ patience flames on the furthest continents of faith. “That burn doesn’t seem to want to heal,” writes Simone Weil in her journal; not far below she notes the price for best Italian ices. In the Sistine Chapel, the last hellmouth glows like a room whose absent owner left lights on as illusion to prevent all realities that…

“‘Container of the Uncontainable’…doesn’t fully convey the sense of the Greek. I think a better translation would be ‘fits the unfittable,’ but that just sounds awkward…” — NICOLE ROCCAS, TIME ETERNAL —————————-1. There is no angel. —————————-2. There are cicadas clicking like a ——————————-vinyl record stuck on one relentless ——————————-everlasting note. There is occasional ——————————-lowing…

I. I come into this world on a pair of earrings—a coil of light on her spined ear—hoopoe birthmark at her nape sifting the heft of the dhow—through her hair she wears the heaviest bells——ears cupped in shell weather she knows the price of a ticket across the black waters is not possible——— bismillah is…