More on: poetry

-even the blossoms of heal-all.
Everyone has something to spirit away—
——-the mother at the well’s stone altar,

her daughters praying in the shade.
——-The forlorn, Paddy called them. All of us
who find our way through the thorny gorse.

–—to light eternal your name—even if they’d take us away—we live on,
———————-—curious, igniting, ricochet, even if—just for one more day—

My love, I can’t fathom you
nor life without the memory of you.
The preacher says there’s nothing
new under the sun. I argue
he forgets our forgetfulness.

The beetle in the rose brings news of God.
His hunger for beauty will kill us all.

We come into dusk
on roads narrowed by briar,
dewberries firing red
and purple musk in heat.

Then the archangel spoke. The Tree of Mercy that exudes
A strenuous air, that bears an ocher stain beneath flanks
Of white leaves, whose blossoms brush the fruits animals
May eat, when the flank of white leaves stirs, it blushes,
What the season of offering does to its scapegoat victims,
After the forces of the design scorched its cast-iron sea,
And despite what remains, the rotten air burns out a shell,
And despite what remains, some try to rebury the dead.
And the archangel spoke.

In the time before time      artists fill in

the blanks with grain abstractions      Hatch marks

and lattices graze the plain      River grasses

thresh the earth      Grids of inky linen

Natalie and Ben and Ori and Eliora are King of the Jews on Tuesdays and Thursdays
on Sundays and Wednesdays.
They go to their King of the Jews Mall
and spend money at Sephora and Shake Shac

I returned to the imperfect city to retire
the myths I mistook for love.
Coins glinted in imperial fountains.
Flowers awaited a protagonist’s hand.

To the scion of a folded utopia
falls the second draft