More on: Poetry

Piero della Francesca’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels For half an hour we had the painting mostly to ourselves, and the longer we stood there taking it in together, the more the people drifting around us seemed to disappear. We spoke quietly when we spoke at all, as though trying not to discomfort the…

The purple plant of abstinence grows in the murky shade gnaws at the caterpillar with its thorny teeth and snarls at its mealy flesh noli me tangere as if to crawl along its spiny hands the index finger stained with negatives were death, the sour wash of corpses circling down the winding drain that rusty…

The how, the where are clear enough: you left one place, arrived another, but not whole, and groaning like a sax gone short on breath, the wail of way too late to ever roll the evening back to sober, slate to clean, forgive to forget, road unglazed with ice— too late to take it back…

The sun, the darkness, the winds are listening…. —Geronimo, Chief of the Bedonkohe Apache   Boys, I shit you not, it’s Oklahoma, Billy says, the Red River more red than river squatted under the border bridge like the raw ass-end of Mars, dry skin peeled under the flying rubber of Billy’s bald tires. As I drive…

Now light fills the tree outside our window— tree whose fruit, when it comes, only the birds, and just a few of them, want to eat, tree that turns stiff and dry midsummer, rushing the season, so we fear the city will come and butcher it, though so far it’s been spared because in spring…

First try, the bird dropped                                              from the sky, belly-flopping the surface that separates our two worlds, and came up empty.                                     He rose again and wung away in easy, languorous strokes, as if it was all part of the plan. Hunger returned him. But whose? What surprises us now, despite our dragnet…

The tools of the trade lay scattered on the floor below the altar, migrating to its surface (protected under plywood and a cloth tarp) only after the first few days, when the fine mist of wood dust that settled over the pews and furnishings helped us to feel more at ease in this space now…

No you’re not a saint because you spare the maid a stubborn skid mark by swiping the bowl clean with an oven-mitt- sized toilet-paper wad during the one mid-flush moment between water’s vanishing and return before you step under the turbo multi-jet gleaming steaming solid-brass showerhead so brilliantly designed to make you feel exactly as…

Do you know the taste of Eden?— the history of the world is on your lips: apples and sin! Fingertip to fingertip God electrifies the elite elect: Adam on the Sistine Chapel, while the devil is on the lam. Who sold Adam to the worm?—script of dust to dust in death’s kinship— God took up…

Numb-nerved roots plumb frigid ground. Death, not prayer, rules the apple grove. Love, not death, moves Jesus in his alcove. Soundlessly apples fall earthbound. Tapped sap opens the maple’s wound. The moon pulls earthly seas in gravity’s groove. The wall of roses spent, thorns lasso the loose trellis. Time owns the shroud and the crown…