More on: Poetry

O Listener, You know how pleased I can be with the sounds of my own words. But sometimes a prayer comes out half chewed, like a tough crust that sticks in the teeth. Or spat out, the stone from a sour plum. What if my prayer is thin, rote, barren of belief? If so, remind…

They’re on the move again, across the soundless moonlit snow, five deer single file along the narrow trail they deepen night after night with their heart-shaped hooves. Shivering, I watch them. Back in bed, in flannel up to my nose, I listen and listen. In my mind already the pipes have frozen and burst, water…

Wanting to be that place where inner and outer meet, this morning I’m listening to the river inside, also to the river out the window, river of sun and branch shadow, muskrat and mallard, heron, and the rattled cry of the kingfisher. Out there is a tree whose roots the river has washed so often…

For they considered not the miracle of the loaves: for their heart was hardened.                             —Mark 6:52 I understand now how the disciples could touch thousands of pieces of bread with their hands and still not get it, how so many salt fish could shimmer only in the periphery of their consciousness. Life schleps on.…

Icon of the Trinity, Andrei Rublev, Tretyakov Gallery We had gone to Moscow on a journey from the suburbs of Dublin and scattered townlands of West Cork, flying eastward into darkness, a night of prehistoric stars, millennia of Christianity evolved in our names: Joseph, John, and James. And then we came, at last, to stand…

in memory of Agha Shahid Ali 1. The wind perused the street and the debris, then thumbed through leaves that scraped the air. Nothing was in order or in bloom, but you stood on the sidewalk, streaked by noon’s light, making a shield from your sheaf of poems. You wanted even the trash the wind…

He shaped them out of balsa wood, one model plane after another, a boy during Word War II. With sharp blade in his small hand he carved the curves for what could hover over his bed at night, until a whole fleet of planes hung from the ceiling, breezes through the window rustling them into…

The whole city floats beneath our feet. Arched bridges hold it together, we say, lulled into dreams and into each other’s arms, window open to soft lapping. And at dawn a dove coos, two eggs loose on the bare windowsill. We arrived by air in Rome, then the train on rails over wooden posts driven…

When an Iranian Jew tells me that, in the nineties, the man who censored films for the regime was blind— that his assistant, a teenage boy, had to describe to his master every frame that might make imperfect their revolution—I think, of course. What better metaphor could there be to explain such foolishness? How else…

Sleepless, the fish wait ——-for the steer’s head, —————a ceremony they have learned to require—primordial ——-as the filaments of gills —————but honed in this economy of flesh: the apprentice’s arcing ——-heave, the silvery shattering —————of the surface, then, slowly, their prize’s descent. By the time ——-it reaches them, its mute bewilderment —————has relaxed into nothingness,…