More on: Poetry

Four young daughters dead.
Marble wall plaque.
The names are blue.

A pine tree staring you in the face,
A turkey buzzard swirling over the valley
And you looking out and pretending you know
Why the air comes just to push it around

It was our last summer before the loop of that love tore off
broke free like a dog through a screen door

One time when my young son saw the moon in daylight
he named it flatly.

He leads her
through the streets lined with stands of bleary pears
and baby shoes, through the city stunned
with bunkers, some of the 750,000 built in the Hoxha years.

Your face is strange.
As if Death drew it by hand from memory,
using a piece of charcoal.

You pointed to the headboard and said,
There are the headwaters.
Let me cross over to you.

We can’t love

an abstraction. So, I begin with my cats.

This much is certain
to me: Prayer ends up
somewhere, like the bright
death throes of a star

Blasphemers in taverns slurred sacred hymns and the lame lay bellowing on the steps to shrines where beggars repented prideful sins.