More on: poetry

Sound with the cries of Rachel’s children. Moan over empty hillsides and river runnels, among the broken stones of abandoned streets and fallen fences, through empty channels and sharp-ledged ravines resonant with echo. Rasp and rattle with the integrity of a perfect reckoning down the metal roof onto the splash pans of gutters, down the…

A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin black legs and their needle-nail toes across the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato. Although blind at night, she nevertheless fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry on one side of the path, links it to…

On an island in the disputed region of the Yellow Sea, blooms of smoke from the shelling of the garrison weave into one bloom, one force of nature so thick, they say, you cannot see your hands. The planet, we know, tilts on its axis like a man contemplating a problem, spun toward the horizon…

As he raises my bookshelf, empty now, and therefore heavy with what I do not know, my friend the carpenter speaks so kindly of all the dark acolytes of one god who walk the streets of ground zero in fear, beneath the shadows and mistrust that pour down the highest places like waterfalls of dust.…

Rifraff By Stephen Cushman (Lousiana State University Press, 2011) A Walk in Victoria’s Secret By Kate Daniels (Lousiana State University Press, 2011) Bone Fires: New & Selected By Mark Jarman (Sarbande Books, 2011) Every Riven Things By Christian Wiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)   CENTRAL TO MOST SPIRITUAL, personal, or religious beliefs—whether one of…

———Then will I carry you within me for as long ———as I can: not a ———consolation but a promise, and not because ———I must: not as you ———carried me but to be your keeper, a place where ———you remain the one ———bearing life: not as a god or idol that I ———have made too small,…

Hiking in Switzerland with a bad back and doctor’s orders not to fall, through meadows of bluebells and buttercups, daisies and tiny orchids of pale lavender, tiger-striped mossy rocks, forget-me-nots, even the thistles tender in their bristly buds. But danger lurks in beauty of the shining rock slippery with summer melt when here the trail…

The Eighth Day after Creation Then what a falling-off there was, unruly man, a violent God— when earth gave way, and rocks sprang up, volcanoes poured their fire down and mountains rose with jagged crags to form a world outside the plot. Though here today among the glaciered peaks pine stems still grow straight up…

for my father Having pictured the soul as a kind of private moon that hovered invisibly above a person’s shoulder, when my mother said a man and woman’s love for one another could bring their child’s soul down from heaven to be born, I saw it as a cloud-like orb slipping down from the vicinity…

An unexpected reflection of myself in a passing window glances this way then after a quick double-take recognizes me. Like me, she’s caught by surprise; no time for the split second preparations that tend to precede looking in a mirror, or to hide the disappointment in her eyes, her sense that had we met incognito…