More on: Poetry

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…

One morning after the crucifixion, a Sudanese boy came to see his mother and father. He found his hut burnt to the ground. Two figures dressed in white asked him, “Boy why are you weeping?” “Because,” he replied, “they have taken away my family, and I do not know where they have laid them.” The…

after Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise The experts are saving the prophets and their wall, ___the prophets and the law, and the door ______to paradise. What does it profit ________a man to gain the whole, the world Yet to lose, or to loose his head from the Renaissance ___and its gilt-stripped doors of bronze? ______The fire-gilded…

Take, for example, This sunflower stuck in a vase. Its huge dark center daily sheds a load of pollen Onto the fake wood veneer of my desk, as if my desk Were dirt; this room, a field; the window, a planet’s Rectangular sky. The myth of ongoingness. We must assent, we do, The clouds rumbling…