More on: poetry

He will burrow and gallop, buffalo the prairie again, penguin the unhatched egg, then sleep off centuries of miracles with the three-toed sloth. What a magician, one minute pirouetting among banks of cumulus, the next grazing underground cafés with the star-nosed mole. Out of caves, from under bridges, a million translations of a single verb,…

At Poulnabrone Dolmen Argyle poured his soul’s ache into the hole of sorrows, huddling under the ancient capstone against the cold and crueler elements. Stone portal, stone cairn, stone everywhere— the rocky desert of the Burren bore a semblance to his own hard-weathered heart made barren by years of cast aspersions, pox, maledictions, cursed loneliness…

Argyle shat himself and, truth be told, but for the mess of it, the purging was no bad thing for the body corporal. Would that the soul were so thoroughly cleansed, by squatting and grunting supplications. Would that purgatories and damnations could be so quickly doused and recompensed, null and voided in the name of…

HISTORY IS WRITTEN by the victors, so the saying goes. It would be pleasant to believe that the history of literature (or the arts in general) might prove an exception to this rule, that artistic merit will always be recognized in its own time, regardless of fashion or ideology. But we know that’s not true.…

When they heard from his friend, the woman, that he’d escaped the cave, they’d already forgotten how Lazarus once had come out at his command, although they protested, fearing he’d bear some unholy perfume that would make fools of all who saw the miracle. That dead man, sweet as clean laundry, even ate some dinner,…

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. ——————-—Stephen Hawking And so it has been accomplished, the way worms wriggle miraculously from a leftover cheese, rats from…

Something whispered I wanted more of myself. That’s how I turned into the fleur of myself. The lake. The ripple’s shimmer. That lilting face. I’ll guzzle the infinite pour of myself. What is this flow I feel, its course through soft bone? The current? The mother lode? The ore of myself? Fill me with all…

I sometimes think back to my youth Remembering the heavy sack of sin on my shoulders And I bent double so it seemed Across the fields, with scarecrows hung on crosses, Along straight roads that led to nowhere, Weighed down in ditches, barns, the hollow trees I slept in; And how I searched like a…

Prayer means shedding of thoughts. ——————–—Evagrius Ponticus My heaven is a stripping of the mind. I make this glittering desert be a desert The burning rock, rock, blue sky just sky Until they are pristine; but then I find The desert leads me to its opposite Noise-vomiting Constantinople, And sky reminds me of the boundless…

An old Jewish tradition, dating back to the Talmud, records that the world is sustained by the presence of at least thirty-six tzaddikim. These people do their good deeds quietly: their neighbors do not know who they are. If, however, that minimum of truly saintly people does not exist, then the world itself will perish.…