More on: Poetry

I flash back to you sometimes in your bassinet, your diaper and knit cap, your loincloth and thorn crown. Breastbone split with a chisel, your heart’s hinge is a teak diptych, the altarpiece of my conversion into father. You bore the needlestick stigmata on the backs of your hands, and later, when the veins blew,…

Before your birth, a priest once laid his ear against your mother’s stomach and heard your heart murmur rumors of an earthquake. The day you were born, the same priest laid his hand against your breastbone, reshaped you, son, and cut a passage through the Red Sea of your blood, not breathing life’s breath into…

To your left, you will see what appear to be nuggets of charcoal, but in fact, they’re considerably rarer than lunar rocks. This glass case is airtight and soundproof. Contain them in anything less, and the screams in these hell stones (think of the waves in a conch shell you hold to your ear) would…

Quechula Church, 28 August 2002, 35mm I. Its sun-dark arches mirror in the black receding water. The white mountains rise behind the exposed church. Only a week before, its stones were hidden, covered with the Grijalva River. Swallowed by the wide mouth of the arch that was the door, I walk away from you, shin-deep,…

…from deep in the realm of the dead I called for help and you listened to my cry.                      Jonah 2:2b Their shorn heads shined like gourds under the fluorescent lights. Bright fish, cut from construction paper, hung above their beds. Tell us again, they said,…

after Paul Klee Under a sky like this, under the weight of your gravity, my robe, my head, my heart pulled down. O Lord, you have fashioned stars and portcullises, one-eyed dogs, conjured the terrible, endless plains where I grew up; and conjured time which does not pass here, and eternity, which does— groaning out…

after Paul Klee I thought I heard someone crying— but it was me making that low noise like a radio under a blanket in a drawer in the far wing of heaven. My own crying disguised the way paper goes disguised as origami or the backs of photographs. The lesson today was Logos, God saying…

for MC Under a blue tent with someone else’s name on it Sweeney and her name was not Sweeney We saw a marble urn, your mother was in it Let the baby rest a flower on her ledge A white rose on a square urn —Wedge to eternity— While we rose and sank with words…

—-My fee for appearing in one of your dreams is fifty cents a night. No fee at all for appearing as a cloud but think of me please when you wake. As for angels, the illustrator must be paid for her artistry. Her pen tip is sharp. Her ink is blood. She draws directly on…

A plain-bellied snake waits near the bridge in the park. Her body is gray and heavy. Her skin looks to feel of hard fruit packed with sand. For two days, her body moves like a nightmare: once quick swim into the lake, once shifts so small I think my mind is full of tricks. Creeping…