More on: darkness

But, if you didn’t notice, there is the cross: / the cross that includes everything as it / excludes nothing

There will be thousands of warm nights

like this one, millions of the beetles, this whole darkened face
of earth erupting in brief constellations.

Praise the mockingbird,

unashamed that he is alone, praise the beetle,
the hornet, all night’s shy & vicious ornaments . . .

The knife was held like night— quiet in her husband’s hand. In silence, the umbilicus was snipped. The moon went on shining. A mare leapt astride a stallion. Jerusalem was drowning. A match dropped. Hay fired. Kings slunk away. The world hung heavy on her breast. —Love’s foundling. A curtain twitched: unholy neighbors. A nosey…

I am the whisper matches rattle in their cold and boxy hovels. I’m desire gone to ground. I am efficient, almost secret; you can read in me such scripture of the most compacted and contented red-light district. Impish sample seraph, humblest in lust, I am the apocryphalest rumor waiting just around the corner. See me…

What does God want with so many stars and black holes in infinite space? What is God’s plan on rainy nights when the wind blows and topples the flowers? In this dark empire the gift of uncertainty follows me through the forest. Maybe I dreamed the clearing I saw in the trees.   Translated from…

Fiche bliain ag fás, Fiche bliain ag borradh ’sag at, Fiche bliain ag titim, Fiche bliain cuma tú ann nó as. ___________ —Traidisiúnta, Déisibh Mumhan 1. Dead leaves scrape across the paving of the derelict church. A small crowd is gathered with candles. A priest sits by a white-clothed table. How long more can we…

It’s what I need to practice, the lines of my life too neatly drawn around the comfort of being here. It’s why I’m out here again, in the middle of the field just as the day pauses between what is and what was, darkness rising up between the hemlocks and spruces that have brought their…

…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…