More on: poetry

Once, there was a path from springhouse to kitchen’s side entrance splitting the hill. Once, there was a sudden almost- funeral: daughter gasping in the water trough, pushed in by older brother now turned senator. Farmers once retrieved dippers for clear gulps between harvest and the afternoon milking, the springhouse door fashioned to resist an…

(Twenty-four crusts to be frozen) Rise when sky’s amber. As coffee pot fusses, sift dry ingredients, butter the size of an egg. Measure out the needed doses. Have a passing thought about those years you weren’t allowed in this farmhouse kitchen without permission, how your new mother- in-law clucked each time flour clouded to the…

or something in the sight adjusts itself to midnight…. —Emily Dickinson For a while, I’ve been considering nothing. The nothing my grandmother refused and my grandmother’s grandmother, all of them stretching back through the void with their kinds of certainty bracing the light of the stars. In the Methodist church, my grandmother opened her hymnal,…

The animal in us wants to leap up, leap out maybe, like the dog on its chain trying to bound higher and farther than the chain allows because the two boys in their kiddie pool are bounding, scooping up water in their hands and tossing it and jumping, as the woman beside the house on…

There is No God But God. I think Therefore I am. I am; There is Therefore No God. I think, “But God, But God….” I am, I…think. Is there No God Therefore? Therefore Good for No God Am I. There is, I think, “I.” Think There: For There is But God. I am No God,…

I just couldn’t breathe in its shadow. It weighed what the cross weighed, that shadow Cross, more than any shadow should. No Sun could shoulder that kind of shadow, No man kneel there without a shudder. The dark beams crushed me flat as shadow, My flesh, grass, matted by the shade. No Way a mere…

_____What is truth That truth-telling is like theft Under your odd, local laws? Your own kind call you scofflaw. In fact, they prefer a thief. We don’t nail your type in Rome; Preach, and we just stroll past you _____And your truth. _____What is truth Anyway but a king thief Talking his way past the…

In all this wind I’m sure you’ll find something empty, an unsent package or the edge of a glass. Perhaps you’ll come back cradled, released to your barest parts. My emptiness loves yours. Can you hear it? As grace and distraction, our many selves bend in order to sing. You’d tell me the better to…

Blessed Are Those Who Yearn New Poetry in Review The Glacier’s Wake by Katy Didden (Pleiades Press, 2013) God Loves You by Kathryn Maris (Seren Books UK, 2013) Incarnadine by Mary Szybist (Graywolf Press, 2013)   AT THE END of Paradiso, Dante, after confessing his inability to describe the vision of Love he sees, nonetheless…

An old man was dying in the hospital, —-my friend the doctor told me. He was eighty-nine, his whole life a tailor in a shop —-below the room where he was born. He had no one, so a kind aide from Ghana —-sat with him, one hand in his the other holding her sandwich. The…