More on: Poetry

You believe He’s stronger than the desert wind butting against the fence, wind that ignites sagebrush, tears through the hills and strips the houses to ash. Despite your lips that crack till blood comes, skin that grows rough between your fingers, you believe He will be solid to your touch the way the bay is…

Lord of worn stone cliffs and the guileless trill          of the canyon wren; Lord of stunted hemlocks, imperiled mussels, seeds that fall on shallow soil;          Lord of boreal forests, of the fragile nitrogen cycle, of vanishing aquifers, spreading          deserts; Lord of neglect and…

Holy Week again:             unleavened sky, all tensions held past hold. Mostly, what I feel is the unlikelihood. These days, pick a miracle,             there’s science to explain it. Say it’s nighttime in the Garden, Jesus praying in a bloody sweat: Hematidrosis—rare; not unknown—            …

I think he planned it, sort of, from the start; whether he knew they’d choose the fruit or not, he scattered hints around the garden, what to do in case they got themselves kicked out. A shirt of fur around the lamb. The stream converting water into syllables. Bamboo pipes. The caps of mushrooms round…

Sister storm, hurling your javelins too near our window, don’t you care if in darkness, we splinter like a bright waterfall, if we catch fire from the sparks you send flying from the grindstone of night? You have cracked our sky with lightning; you have made glass pitchers of our bodies and poured our spirits…

Imagine someday the splurge drains out of fall. Holding a melon you know a creek of light streams inside its rough burlap ball, but if you cut it open you know stars will fall extinguished in the dark. You know the quarrel of the squeaky porch swing, know the cold that stacks goldfish like knives…

It’s what I need to practice, the lines of my life too neatly drawn around the comfort of being here. It’s why I’m out here again, in the middle of the field just as the day pauses between what is and what was, darkness rising up between the hemlocks and spruces that have brought their…

  I stood in the Jaffa Gate and played harmonica for tips. A cluster of men in Arab dress surrounded me, bewildered, smiling. They had never heard a harmonica before, nor could they see, behind my hands, this sound I held to my lips. The long cry of the muezzin, undulating among corbelled roofs, towers,…

In this late season, who is the woman at the well drawing water, reflecting on the woman at the well? Millennial fissures in the well-rim, weed-choked cracks where brackish water rises for the woman at the well. At the bottom of the well shaft, the sky’s reflective eye opens, closes on the shadow of the…

We’ve left the crib, the family animals, the unstable first trinity. Forgiven the all night journeys made in haste, the rough beds, the secrets and baffling dreams. Since our father left us, his words in our ears orate a baritone poetry, wild and strong enough to hold the yes and the no. Again the sun…