Diagramming the Live Oak
By Poetry Issue 105
Because we die, we all die, and the oak lives,
those imagined rings like so many glasses
Jacaranda
By Poetry Issue 103
not in weakness, but in tender
resolution to give way, be broken. . .
Such Are the Rituals
By Poetry Issue 103
When I tilt the cup
it drains like a face.
Strategies for Dealing with Impermanence
By Poetry Issue 103
The boy inside me is watching, frowning.
But something else is watching him,
saying, sweetheart, saying, it is so hard.
Read MoreThree Colors: Blue
By Essay Issue 93
Krzysztof Kieślowski (1993) DO YOU FEEL ABLE TO TALK? is the first full line in Three Colors: Blue, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece of a meditation on grief and liberation. “Were you conscious during the….” is the next. The doctor is unable to finish the question he poses to a woman who has just lost her husband…
Read MoreTempest
By Poetry Issue 93
Paul Mazursky, director (1982) Kalibanos welcomes you to his comfy cave, and if the Sony Trinitron proves defective so too does the illusion that you had slipped free from the world and its ubiquitous corruptions, that you could simply say you would no longer play the soul-eroding role of mute, complicit slave. Many frames will…
Read MoreSweet Life
By Poetry Issue 93
La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini (1960) In a frame or two, Marcello will turn away, finally having failed to hear her voice, the angelic girl beckoning from across the estuary’s rift in the beach, etching in the sand the divide between his world and her world. Behind him, in that flat expanse to which he…
Read MoreSovereignty of the Void
By Essay Issue 92
YOU MIGHT BE AT A DISTANCE from your life. As always: an ordinary state, banal. Your body headed straight for the abyss, with the forward momentum of age. And beneath the freshness of blood there is weakness, ashes. Nostalgia: the soul. Sick, yes. Without a doubt: sick. And the real name of that sickness would be…
Read MoreGraveyard Prayer
By Poetry Issue 92
Lord, here I am again at the graveyard where I’ll be buried, but for now where I rest before walking back home. I like to lie with my back on the grass and study the clouds, a Constable imposter, or sit on my gravesite and look at this little village— the cemetery, seven old houses…
Read MoreMy Life as an Open-Air Temple
By Poetry Issue 92
From cramped to roofless ——-I became—I don’t know how— ————–an open-air temple with no pillars. My walls of stone, lichen-covered, where many feet came to pray. ——-The willows shook around me ————–as mice and small insects knelt in moonlight, I could feel the breath of many spirits ——-winging through my chamber: ————–rabbis dropping pocket lint—…
Read More