More on: poetry

for William Christenberry Some people have told me that this subject is not the proper concern of an artist or of art. On the contrary, I hold the position that there are times when an artist must examine and reveal such strange and secret brutality. It’s my expression and I stand by it. ——————————W.C. I.…

The sexton lives in a big stone house. After supper he unlocks his church for a fee. Our tour group pays to climb past organ and choirloft, into the belfry where the daring grip a sheep-skinned knot and pull the rope straight down into a scene from the novitiate when I was in love with…

by these and countless other dear / impediments, I stoop to find / my knees

We say flight of the imagination, but stand ankle-deep in silt. We say deep life of the mind, but seal the stone to keep the tomb untouched, O Stillness. Nearly all we find to say we speak for the most part unawares, what little bit we think to say unmoved, O Great Enormity Unmoved. Brief…

The breakfast was adequate, the fast itself sub-par. We gluttons, having modified our habits only somewhat within the looming Lenten dark, failed quite to shake our thick despair, an air that clamped the heart, made moot the prayer. Wipe your chin. I’m dying here in Omaha, amid the flat, surrounded by the beefy, land-locked generations,…

The daughter of a Tuskegee Airman and a teacher, Marilyn Nelson was brought up primarily on military bases and started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her BA from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1970) and the University of Minnesota (PhD, 1979). Her…

There is a moment prayer occurs to the conscious mind, or rather the absence of prayer in the moment of need hitherto. Experience names the vacuum it has been seized by, only the mouth— the physical fact of the mouth, sensuous, capable of beauty or deceit— can’t form the words the ventral thalamus is telegraphing.…

1. A sheep and a goat is Jacob and Esau. A sheep and a goat and angel with trumpet is the end of things. Put the goat on the left, sheep on the right. A pair of animals means flood or garden—depends if you want to destroy it all or save it. Or name it.…

The leaves on the lawn are brown. Beneath them, the wet ground. Beneath them, the silver roots. Beneath them, the darkness. Given the chance to change, you hold on, the fist a clenched bulb. Last year’s tulips come up again, smaller, shorter, failing— the stunted stem a symptom. The rain tastes like copper, an old…

You have come to a time when everything is loss— your parents dead, your friends dying or gone south. You have come to a time when you have money and nothing you care to do with it, though you take cruises, spoil the grandkids, redecorate the house, which, schooled in irony, echoes as if abandoned.…