More on: poetry

In the white of the yard the snow provides, they arrived, making form seem careless dream while they fed. From their sentences (like guides) I know they swung back hoof to front, to seem to letter selves through white in slow confessions. I want to know the faith they’re lurching toward. Something like faith in…

Forgive them, for they don’t know what they do. Blood, veins, infinity, the garden, your words in metaphor: the whole story rises dark blue in the trees’ green burdens, drenched with voice. Blood, veins, infinity, the garden, your words all dissolve, like the story itself, to myth in the trees. Green burdens drenched with voice…

Dana Gioia—poet, critic, and arts leader—has sometimes said, “I’m the only person who ever went to Stanford Business School to become a poet.” A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, he studied at Stanford (BA, MBA) and Harvard universities (MA), worked as VP of marketing for General Foods, and has published four poetry collections…

The sky clears like a good idea for a few blue hours sprung between industrial grays; it lures me out for a walk, unfurled and pumping, loose beyond my neighborhood. A child is taking advantage of the weather of expansion. He kneels on patchy lawn, kid businesslike, a box of wares and quick for sale…

In high-school Latin, I first read Augustine and wary could not, even threatened by grades, be made to care for his florid rhetoric or thieving of pears. Uphill I trudge from the Antonine baths Augustine must have known. The basement remains where puddles reflect fallen columns, their leafy capitals upside down. A corner maquette under…

Hold up your palms to the darkness little one; be pierced with light. Come here for what, for irony and progeny, short years of rising up and passing on? As if there were an end to transience, as if it could ever pass for shelter or resting place. Reason is lost upon such reasonableness when…

The day Christ died a record-long freight train barreled through the Rollins Road crossing. For seven minutes tankers and lumber flats vibrated through the spikes in his wrists. A fisherman dropped his pole by the retention pond and headed toward the hill. A girl at a bus stop clutched her side as the embryo implanted…

Since I stole your money, Philemon, and even more, myself, the body that broke earth and stacked stones at daybreak while you slept, you have every right to lash me till the whites of my intestines show, brand FUG on my forehead, or throw me to the lions, who love especially the taste of escaped…

Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God…. —Isaiah 40:1-5 Until the day falls there is nothing I can say, my friend. Until the mountain kneels. He suffered so long in wordless suffering, a pain without wounds. May your brother, who belongs now to remember, be restored to light as wood is by ember.…

She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. In one of John Donne’s under-read hymns, on his sickness, he claims one place held Paradise and Calvary—Adam’s disgrace, too: over whose tree we choose…