More on: poetry

“I didn’t get in trouble whenever I drank, but whenever I got in trouble I was drinking,” says Wayne. We’re sitting together with ten inmates in folding chairs. I like Wayne, I like his thinking, I even like his God and his prayers. The herd of Morgan horses in his pasture comes alive with light…

We planted the seeds in the spring And up they came innocuous as crabgrass. The tomatoes soon lorded over them, And even the jalapenos, sad lumps Hanging from their limbs like mittens From children playing in the snow. They stayed that way all summer, And before the frosts of November We pulled them up, declaring…

Go then into the spare light of dawn, Into the sparkling rime, from the long dream Of yes and no, stand still as the falcon passes Close behind and then in a rush of feathers Embraces the crooked pole and its power line; Go, believing in some destination, onto the shore Where destination founders, where…

The sea wind whispers and the tall oaks shake, their leaves shimmering in the August noon. And now the dry grass wrinkles and the floorboards flame. Saffron motes, a distant bird cry, this brackish sea. What was it you figured the wind might say? The oaks sway gently this way and that. Like young girls…

Steep concrete stairs leading up to the empty stadium’s ledge— and was it a moment’s lapse, that one step out onto air? Or was there a clamor, a shrieking inside, a pack chasing her, creatures who prodded and leered, who for so long, like sleeping dogs, she gingerly stepped around, and perhaps had come to…

The monk stipples the page with convoluted trails of lead toasted rust red, brick red, the color first used for rubric and for miniature. Three thousand tiny dots prick the initials, as if the text itself were pierced with nails, red edging each green, black, or yellow letter to embolden the story of Christ’s dolor…

King’s yellow for the king’s hair and halo, mixed if the monastery can’t afford the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord, to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro, in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard not gold but arsenic and sulfur. The Word…

for the Twelve-foot Tall Dancing Icons of Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California In a church in a city on the edge of the world The risen Christ dances Over the heads of the congregants Who are also dancing The risen Christ dances With all the saints—certified or surprised Who are…

We are walking in the mild midwinter Snow and thin ice, up Coldwater Creek, Its many tributaries, their steep ravines Tracing the blue and brown lines that wind Dizzily over the unfolded whiteness of our new Map like staves for the crazy earth song we’ve been Sight-reading with our feet; we are singing the impossible…

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb…. —John 20 She came to take care of the body. Some are like that. They feel the need to touch and handle _____where life was. We call it seeking closure. We call it clinging. We call it having difficulty facing reality; the reality that life itself _____has left…