More on: Poetry

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…

And they rent their garments and painted their foreheads with ash in supplication and lament. The bright stone of the moon bent down, still upon the water where they stood to the knees in cold reflected stars. Breeze in branches made the sound of women wiping their eyes with paper or breathing in an icy…

During the Oregon centennial celebration, my Boy Scout troop, dressed as cowboy cavalry, was brought to the dog track to rout a whole tribe of Cub Scouts dressed as Indians in a wild reenactment of a battle that had never occurred or had occurred a thousand times, depending on your degree of historical specificity. Firing…

I have begun to think that God is small like a wren, a piece of blue beach glass shining in the wet of sea and sky, that double exposure. Every day the huge sun, the blue vault brimming with invisible stars. Each night the echoing expanse of dark and always God in the palm of…