More on: Poetry

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…

Think of your parents before you. First children themselves, fourth graders when Kennedy was shot. Half of you inside your mother, even then. Months away from a first confession. Then meeting by chance in a drive-in parking lot, your future father mistaking your mother for some other girl with long black hair. And with one…

for Bronisław Anlen The stones are gathering And who was supposed to come Where there is stone upon stone it’s because they’re familiar Here a stone says kaddish with its weight its multitude and stones the place in the painless grass The stones are gathering Here sometimes an old man will lug inside him feldspar…

She had nothing but eyes she hadn’t yet grown into inside them quite by chance two stars of David that a tear might extinguish so she wept Her speech was not silver worth at least some spit a turn of the head her weeping speech full of hunchbacked words so she stopped speaking Her silence…