More on: poetry

“I have come to love you in spite of—” ―Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng   straddling the windowsill                   watching morning glimmer from the terminal spectral gray         becoming blonde as coffee cools     here near where                   chirrups erupt       whoosh of man hosing down cleft sidewalks               raising wraiths of spray against loops of barbed wire…

For God is in heaven, and you upon earth. —Ecclesiastes 5:2 Don’t take your eyes off the road. Accept nothing as given. Watch where you put your hands. You’re here and God’s in heaven. Be careful where you step. The drop-off’s somewhere near. The fog won’t lift tonight. God’s in heaven. You’re here. That word…

The swallows dive near and twist Their invisible strings as if Binding you hand and foot, And tumble away, swallows like souls In paradise, whispering, “Here is one Who will increase our loves….” Every summer they came, they must have— Who could stop them?—to build Where they had built, looping The same knot theories and…

There was a dirt field I’d walk to as a girl, past the convenience store and the train tracks where the day laborers congregated with six-packs, where the two-lane road turned to one lane with yellow stripes and the vacant field loomed like a desiccated fallen sky. That’s where I’d go to sit on an…

The face of the Madonna with child makes a dark mirror of what you are to feel: the temporary but desperate way a part of you is wounded until the hurt becomes a lens. Inside you is a city the mosaic spells out with tiny precious stones across the ceiling and the walls, beginning with…

Lord Mouth dear     Tongue dear Only-Pierceable- Parts to what now shall I compare Thee Lord I am a lonely man     I do not see My children often     to a summer’s day To autumn     Lord     Thou art more peaceable Less difficult to leave to     die in more Relenting though the sun does set     in the sea…

Lord of the hopeless also dear     Hat-Soak Pole-in-the-Canal and Red-Tie Father     Son And Holy Ghost not     in that order break The rottenness of those who torture one Of Thy least wrath-deserving exiles me Not     wholly undeserving     no     but some And isn’t it the some that counts with Thee O     Gondola also as the trees pass…

There are panels of sky as good as forgotten, Evans’ gelatin folds of Florida circa 1934. The line of sky is dark at first where the gulf hits it, then comes to me like a halo around the palm tree with its neck bent, its spray of branches leaning out of frame as if to…

The view from the crest down to the river— you stopping to say that for three weeks each year and beginning tomorrow this will be the most beautiful place in the city—brick-faced buildings blushing in sunlight, star magnolias building and about to burst— soon to be our bright badges, medallions all the way down to…

If a winter storm had ever toppled the blue spruce that towered over the Tandem nursing home, you would not have asked how old the tree was and by that mean a good life had been long enough. You would not have said the tree would no longer suffer indignities and use that to erase…