More on: Poetry

My God my God 

      why are you so far from     my groaning 

The trouble with language is the language:  
its lack, its want, its suffering—all the fire 
I have worshipped morning and evening. 

Took far too long to know I had stopped living  
and begun wearing my life instead.   

I hear these words in your voice no matter who says them, in the well-water smell of the basement, by the artificial tree you and she would one day put a sheet over, so you never had to take it down or put it up again.

Easter, I make myself space 
in a pew facing a pillar  
four feet wide, I’d say, gray,  
mottled, plastered countenance.

Everything close enough fades  

in the coming dark; what’s at a distance, 
gone.

The spaded earth spurts in fury: 
a geyser of yellow jackets torque  

from their lair.

days like my lost eyelashes, 
just dry leaves curled there and here,  

Now you are a monotonousness of grace- 
light under my steps, the unseen seen.

Because we die, we all die, and the oak lives, 
those imagined rings like so many glasses