More on: Poetry

Last night I climbed once more the narrow ladder of my poems. I took my fine pen and turned paper into ash. What were you turned into? What did you become, after? Once you said that to write a poem is to touch the unseen. If I have touched the unseen, it has not been…

Mornings their garden greens and flowers, tomatoes ripen fat as babies’ bellies, hollyhocks tower straight-laced as fence rails. This is not the black-topped yard of her childhood, weedless, grassless, without tree bark or squirrel. Here she follows behind her husband’s wild planting. Where Adam has sown, she is Eve weeding, creating order and the simplicity…

Weightless as a float into the drift of water, one whose sin is forgiven. The Far Country a memory of fists and sour apples. Of that old, heavy plunge through snowfall, frozen, refrozen. The tug of gravity, slow and silent. Of no words forming on dry lips, of breath aching to a full inhale and…

Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. —I Corinthians 15:51 After the smell of lilies filled the tiny country church; after we drove down valleys and across mountains through winter rain and fog and dissipating snow; after the funeral director took our coats and intoned…

So little is legible: glacial till, the moonlight on an iced-over ditch, The moon itself—an opal pruning hook. He could go on like this: list after list, A compendium apropos of nothing more than to place the speaker here, Pointing north, bewitched like a compass needle. Hard to make much that resembles poetry out of…

The death of one god is the death of all. —Wallace Stevens When you left it was as if a glacier retreated, As if the ice tonnage, which rasped, scraped, and scoured for ages, Diminished in a moon’s single phase to a trickle of meltwater. I live in the aftermath—till, eskers, erratics, cirques, exposed bedrock.…

Abba Jacob said: Contemplation is both the highest act of being human, and humanity’s highest language. If the language of things reaches beyond things to designate the Absolute, the silent interior mantra bespeaks a profound communion with that Someone further than ourselves— and communion within ourselves, for the two go together. When we meditate, we…

You lie like a comma in the sentence of your bed. Your legs stack like planks; each hand steadies the opposite shoulder. It’s a position you assume when assailed by dreams or sleepless longing, or on nights you feel you’re breathing broken glass. Tonight you buckle into yourself and mourn two vocabularies, a moldy discourse…

Someone removes the horses and unicorns and stations the carousel in a hotel lobby. Barstools mark the wheel’s perimeter so you can still go for a ride, watching the room orbit slowly around you and the other raw languid girls likewise drinking martinis on a Thursday afternoon. It takes less time to finish a drink…

I’ve always felt I’m someone who could approach her own beheading with unvarnished resignation, no sprees of weeping or remorse; dressed, if I were lucky, in a murky red gown newly made by a servant who would miss me; if not, in a muslin shift worn fine and bleached by countless afternoons drying on mothy…