More on: Poetry

While my dog examined the yellow messages On lampposts And in the dry grass And morsed back messages of its own I asked myself Am I holding the dog by the leash Or is it the other way around And the dog is holding me? Maybe it seems foolish to involve God in this But…

Old Saybrook, Connecticut, April 1827 Wealthy Ann, Ruhama, Othelia, Harriet, Hipsey, and I took the ferry to the big camp meeting in Old Saybrook, where ten famous preachers took turns exhorting us to find Jesus and to serve him by serving each other. The crowd swarmed like ants taking breadcrumbs home. Wealthy Ann said smelling…

e.g. Abolition, Prudence Crandall, the Amistad, Nat Turner, Indian Removal, Female Complaints: First Congregational Church, Lyme, Connecticut, ca. 1816 Even the pulpit Bible was consumed in the fire that turned the meeting-house to ash. An architect planned the new meeting-house, a steeple equipped with a lightning-rod, a belfry, and a golden weathervane; Ionic columns supporting…

_________Lyme, Connecticut, 3 July 1815 Nor’easter and calm shine, high tide and neap, combined lives shuttled between births and deaths, from baptisms to funerals, amen. Mehitabel, Uriah, Moses, John. Robert, Elihu, Azanaha, Love. Wakes, marriages, fallings-out and laughter, arguments, broken hearts, betrayals, guilt: thus time shaped a community of faith. Jerusha, Wealthy, Esther, Hepzibah. Moses,…

On Christmas Eve while the bells were ringing, I saw Christ walking on a street in São Paulo. He was already a man when he was born, swaddled in his manger with solitude and death. The white cold wind whispered a secret: —Life was brief for men and gods, a sigh of Christ breathed in…

What does God want with so many stars and black holes in infinite space? What is God’s plan on rainy nights when the wind blows and topples the flowers? In this dark empire the gift of uncertainty follows me through the forest. Maybe I dreamed the clearing I saw in the trees.   Translated from…

The child who knelt before the wooden altar painted without passion finishes his prayers _______________  and gets up cramped what shakes the skies? Miserable skies that _______________   spill their dregs while I take refuge under the eaves of God’s house ____________   and that don’t clear up I don’t drink you from the chalice that the…

Like prayer __________I come from eternity Why did I have to leave? Above all _________why do I have to go back? It’s really nice here in the countryside An incoherent sentence in this discourse that _________________ goes on without end Blurred parenthesis ________________ between all and nothing Tablet without salvation __________________     faithful reverse whirlwind…

He shelters in you this man ________________________whom no one knew or everyone forgot —His unknown girlfriend ______________________mirrors ___________________________   the quiet dog This case forgotten by his country _________that called him the Madman Member of the squadron that recovered Maceo’s body _________________________still breathing To guard it here ______________beneath this sun that captures these words —String…

For Aciek Arok Deng I leave the camp, unable to breathe, me Freud girl, after her interior, she Lost Girl, after my purse, her face: dark as eggplant, her gaze: unpinnable, untraceable, floating, open, defying the gravity I was told keeps pain in place maybe trauma doesn’t harden, packed, tight as sediment at the bottom…