More on: Daniel Tobin

After Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Illuminated manuscript, 1410-1416 Like dancers in a pirouette the mowers with their scythes, their polished rhythms whispering through harvest’s green ballet. Two women turn the tumbled hay, so slight and stockingless and lithe one could wish the world this script, no hail of brightness perishing through…

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…

National Geographic Explorer You swing through the broad high-branching trees and what hangs from your breast, your stolen charge, flounces like a rag doll clung to by a child whose parents disappeared behind a train’s ashen door. You hover above, primate Eve, as if what you hold could forever be held past passing eons and…

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. ——————-—Stephen Hawking And so it has been accomplished, the way worms wriggle miraculously from a leftover cheese, rats from…

Something whispered I wanted more of myself. That’s how I turned into the fleur of myself. The lake. The ripple’s shimmer. That lilting face. I’ll guzzle the infinite pour of myself. What is this flow I feel, its course through soft bone? The current? The mother lode? The ore of myself? Fill me with all…

In Anselm Kiefer’s Am Anfang A ladder rises like a DNA helix Out of the seething flux, an ocean Of broken glass, shattered light, The bonds just barely linking there, Chiral, as yet un-living, into proto- Membrane, proto-cell, accreting In the sugary stew of their forming, The nucleotides surging tidal As they begin to spiral…

Like an old Victrola, its needle stuck   In the groove where the flamenco dancer Patters her firecracker feet to the floor,   Machine gun maracas, so the cicada Pays homage to its clattery muse,   She who pitied the flight of Tithonus Withering eternally through his dog days,   So the myth tells us,…