More on: earth

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture,
overtaken by another giddiness.

I don’t exist independently of the world around me, that all the boundary lines I like to think keep me separate from others are in some sense imagined and temporally bound. I can’t exist without others. And I may not be the hero of my story.  

And he sent forth a raven and it went back and forth, to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. —Genesis 8:7 To traverse open water searching for signs of life, a seabird is more suited than a land bird, which needs the trustworthy stubble of wheat fields and faithful…

Matter, mother, Maria Names that come from the beginning With tractor or dragged plow or pick, shovel, spade, hoe, black, reddish, parched, mud-caked, the earth is hard to break. Men labor over it as over a woman virgin even after giving birth, laboring as on a sea whose waves close above him—foam, blossom—as men work…

—five—six—seven—eight, and one— The dancers drum onstage from the wings where they were before the downbeat, that prehistoric moment, bandaged and flinching, calloused, split, grinning—the tick-swish of soles on bare wood; their presence shifts how light leaps off the watch of the ex-nun’s date. Such sound bodies. Their backs, extraordinary overlaps of muscle bound to…

Orphan or heir-apparent, did it plummet from heaven or work its way up through the fissures of the earth? Was it chipped from a dollhouse window or a diamond fjord? If the deepest bass virtuoso intones the nethermost D, will this sliver fly off to reunite with its source, setting off a flood of healing…