More on: Poetry

Modern coins the sizes of shine swept off my friend’s bureau in Ghent and pocketed by my careless habit— not brown pennies too dull to return they include designer Devlin’s sculpture of the duckbilled animal swimming up to the top swirl and five kangaroo tails mixed to a dollar. When the Irish attained their republic…

1. Doesn’t everybody get a strange life? Don’t we all get to walk around inside ourselves all day long and sleep there through the whole night? Don’t we all have permanent access to the magnum and the minimum opus, the rising up and the sinking down? Aren’t we granted the right to refrain from occupying…

Of a misty, low-sky morning pressed ——–upon the north sound islands there, just beyond our glassy cove, one might draw ——–yet another sip from the steaming mug and find that, yes, there is so little ——–to be known, so much to be supposed. There beyond the concrete breakwater, ——–the seiner’s skiff begins drawing out the…

When my mother awakened me as a child, her face was the entire room. Later, it was the bishop’s torso that was the whole nave. Confronting me was a blue density, the body from the ribs up. In my memory I am unable to recover the face or the words. I know there was a…

What is at first staring at birds on a wire sooner or later if you think about it becomes staring into air. This was the kind of staring I was doing the day of the blessing, face to face with the bishop, which was also the day I understood longitude and latitude by way of…

Zipped inside a nylon whale, breathing air pumped into that fishy tent, hard not to think of Jonah, sorry and scarved in seaweed, hard not to picture the ship receding, huge watery acres of abyss, breakers sweeping over. And jaws, the tight squeeze through baleen, stew of stomach acid… Until then, easy for him to…

I wouldn’t call gulping a glass of ale and backhanding foam off your upper lip a form of devotion, or the refusal to laugh at an off-color joke a sign of reverence. But I could imagine God, a wounded rat in one hand, a soothing song— I do not say on his lips. No, it’s…

What if every time we saw the word sorrow we switched it to sparrow? ——-For my life is spent with sparrows… ——-With drunkenness and sparrows… Or if it went the other way, the song would be, ——-His eye is on the sorrow…. § My eye’s on the neighbor’s eaves, and the copper-roofed house we put…

Either I’m praying, or I’m holding my hand with my hand. I suppose both are small beggings for favor, simply directed at different thrones. Across the congregation, I’m known as your son even before God’s—and what a pregnant admission that is; your voice, among the choir, is exalted, anointed a favorite by pastor and flock.…

for Granny For as long as I’ve witnessed the affliction of light washing over your skin like this, as you stand hunched over the pink lip of the sink, scrubbing, Sunday spilling through these small windows of time, lighting up the kitchen like some pancake-flipping ghost, your face has always been peppered with moles. Pray…