More on: Poetry

The blue wind in Greece has been busy all night. Unable to sleep from its breathing, I sat through black hours on the terrace, watching the wind’s shadow and dance through moving objects— the sway of dark branches and the vacant bodies of left-out clothing billowed on an unseen line. At dawn, the wind turned…

When the floor collapses, it’s time to make an act of faith.                                    Dominique de Menil Saint Gregory said the body is just an ill-proportioned building. It is unwelcoming: a windowed room with a wood table and fluorescent lighting. A poverty of meaning in doors and feasts; they are merely nonverbal expressions for what…

What is the difference in weight between two stones. One drowns you, the other is a trifling inconvenience. Any discrepancy measures roughly the width of a tongue. Who deserves even a dram of such mercy if every promise is a mistake in translation. For example, say sin, and everyone’s interpretations vary greatly. But, I remain…

A cloud floats in a pool that turns like a slow clock, helping these insects slide from birthing shucks. * Duns roil the surface, twitch and flutter, a newborn or paralytic who believes he can rise and walk again, if only the wind would command him. * Halos drift around red and blue spots that…

She spoke with the voice of an egret, skin swirled with the smell of rabbit tobacco. He hid in honeysuckle to watch her catch dragonflies, blue-green matchsticks with wings glistening like wax paper. Mamaw called them snake doctors, claimed they’d follow all manner of slithering, stitch them back together when they were riven by a…

Invisible One, when I close my eyes I can see you in another way like part of a Pollock I can make sense of not because I see a figure or a face but because the love of a moving brush slung over wet gesso tired of a life of air proves much. Things are…

The prisoner wants the only window’s horizontal iron bars to rust, the raindrops strung before the gray day after rain, these unspendable coins purchasing light and air, these upside-down opals lined up like the pure eyes of guards who have never witnessed battle. The sun comes through, and his mind drifts to some painter studying,…

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…