More on: Poetry

Sent from Troy, Alabama, September 1, 2005 All things fall, all things are built again…. ————(For Bill Thompson) How empty ring the petitions of the saved, Like wind notes in an afterthought of wind When the storm’s done, though the ravaged Nearby you, nearby your salvaged town, Troop like ragged pilgrims to some central dome…

…no evil thing is evil insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is turned… —Saint Gregory Palamás What had I meant to say? Just now. I have forgotten. Which among the extant flourishing phenomena are you? Is that a limp? The evening drifts into its routine dimming of particulars, quite literally evening the scene…

An expert from First Baptist Church in coat and tie came with our class to the Natural History Museum to lead the second grade past the error-filled placards on the walls of the Prehistoric Hall, so we could in innocence admire the skeletons of God’s magnificent extinct creation. I hung back as the class clambered…

Mussoorie, India Lying on the bed below you, I never managed to ask you to pray for us, or to see you weep the blood you’re famous for. I just loved to stare— and you didn’t seem to mind— at your barely blushing cheekbones, lit by the angel’s glow. You warmed me with your incandescent…

You must desire Nothing. —————Saint John of the Cross Light glows off the drifts like a child’s long gaze upwards. Only the sky is heavy, a drum full of laundry—white, reluctantly tumbling. I don’t need to look out the window to know how the corners of houses give themselves away, like people who’d do anything…

———————————————–it marked the edge of a circle, split into the raked sky a seam I thought I saw, and given the right atmosphere, would travel through. Do I believe? The sky was widened slightly, as it widens at the tip of threatened churches, and the spire rises higher so the deity is nearer, so can…

They sound freshly wounded, weeping their few cracked notes. Lullaby to the fly in the web, the torn gazelle, the Ice Man with grass in his shoes fighting sleep on the glacier. Listen, they chorus. Here is the underlying sorrow of the world. In the belly. In the rock. In the black holes of heaven…

Past sundown you bring me here, my first time inside a mosque. Men sitting cross-legged on the floor beside their teacher briefly look up at us, then turn back, on fire to hear the word. You ramble on in praise of Muslim art, exquisite painted tiles, floral carvings in teak, your speech articulate as a…

Dawn sun glints off the dome of a golden statue I never saw in our garden before. Not squat, like my wife’s stone Buddha snug in its niche on the gazebo, but taut with a kind of waking energy, and life-sized for a man of my own height. A breeze tosses the lilac’s leaves until…

Nearing eighty, Fauré has found the end of sound. He never would have guessed it had so much to do with the Mediterranean light of childhood, or lake breezes swirling all summer at Savoy, and so little to do with music growing quieter everywhere but in his mind. He is relieved to hear the garbled…