More on: nature

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,…

But instead of pressing palms tight as I was taught, I cup one palm over the other— fingertips to wrists— before my belly. This is how I show God what I’m asking, how I direct God’s hands to dive into my husband’s gut where cancer harbors in the sea of his bladder— a dark hulk…

Do not make me one of the trees bowing in soft wind, not the heavy branches at sway or the murmuring leaves. But let me be a molecule of water flowing in the veins, the inner blood pressured through the rings. Nothing so grand as ocean waves crumbling on a beach, or the river running…

THEY STOPPED BINDING YOU a while ago, probably because they think you won’t try anything, that you’re too far gone now. You think they’re right. The only time they still use the blindfold is when they do their thing, when they make shallow cuts in your chest and upper arms and thighs, their laughter razor…

In Pierre Bonnard’s The Open Window the artist looks outward from his modest living room. It is summer, the heat baking the orange on the grill-like wall. To the right, a woman is resting in a chair, escaping as she can the sizzling midday air in which even her quizzical black cat blurs in the…

Down the dark way, the dark way down. Everything dark now, as he has come to see: that the way was always dark, the journey dark, the mind dark, the answers like the questions dark, each day dark, the glaucous pearl white eyes, even when the sun spread across the greengold grass, glistening the bright…

Hold the phone, it wasn’t an apple, apples have seeds and seed-bearers, check, perfectly fine in vegan Eden, nor does the story name the fruit, botanical paradox, fruit without seed, which even those grapes, supposedly seedless, have at some stage, albeit vestigial, and if the tree delighted her eyes, then Stevens was wrong, beauty in…

Many days into any kind of drought, whether lost faith or drying riverbed, god from machine seems the only way out. While the ospreys and quick kingfishers scout for their food in prayer, waiting to be led, many days into any kind of drought begins to weaken resolve and feed doubt, so that birds scoop…

In the past, I have asked for what this may be,             more faithfully perhaps, haven’t I, for some covenant of intimate favor             waiting along a byway? So how then should it be seen, what begins as just             a blue, late morning crease between heavy rains, noticing the usual roadside toll             of…

He made the Leviathan for the sport of it, The Lord of my childhood. Her fluke The size of two sleek rowboats For lifting and drawing down Knifelike into the water Or for slapping—so many gestures A fluke or fin can make with or Without ruin. I remember A whale rolling sideways Just—it appeared—so I…