More on: poetry

New York At noon precisely, just as the bells began to ring, the white peacock in the garden of Saint John the Divine spread its glorious tail, making a rippling many-splendored sound, like a sibilant wind rushing through many leaves. The tips of its feathers, shaped like tiny V’s, reminded me of doves descending, the…

All his lighthouses are self-portraits…. ————Jo Hopper on Edward Hopper   Darkness. Darkness & a wild crashing & smashing of waves on the rocks below. My light swinging round & round—shining for a split second on shards of rocky coast & a vast oily blackness ready to swallow small craft & large. I preside over…

An Apprenticeship in Affliction: Waiting with Simone Weil   I DOUBT there is a twentieth-century figure who has inspired more poetry than the French philosopher-mystic Simone Weil. Though her writings were few and fragmentary, their utterly unconventional, severely brilliant insights and her absolute fidelity in living out her own precepts have moved poets to produce…

Today                                       just today is a forgiveness exercise.               I try to live as though yesterday has no hold on me.                    …

The lyrics were appalling. Three little children lying in bed, two were sick an’ the other most dead and how the song, written by James Whitcomb Riley in racist dialect, became a minstrel song. Yet the bread itself was wonderful: cornmeal, flour, hot water, eggs, baking powder, milk, a good deal of shortening. My mother…

—Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame. Black holes dissipate to God knows where, —Yet everything we’ve said and done remains —Like these lilies floating in this garden pool. Each name We’ve said, each paper lantern strung, each cross we’ll bear —In Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame —Yet floats forever here.…

Qui diceris Paraclitus (O Comforter, to Thee we cry) __________—“Veni, Creator Spiritus” Come at me, Comforter. I strain toward your inrushing arrow as it halves then halves then halves the distance that severs us. Till kingdom comes its Zeno-arrow lurches in time lapse, not still where it was, not yet in that place where it…

“There’s been a bloody murder out there.” J. points to the flung ring of feathers in the snow between houses, a bluish semitransparent sunkenness in the middle, a surprisingly beautiful swimming-pool color. I think swimming pool because at my age, I’ve learned to swim a decent crawl (I watched five YouTube videos for technique, how…

You can’t get away from pain, or your sister in pain, or the terrible wide doors of the handicap room. It will break your heart, the way she walks in the easy hotel pool, and then takes up her cane, to shuffle from chair to bed. We’ve picked two days halfway between our towns, to…

Orphan or heir-apparent, did it plummet from heaven or work its way up through the fissures of the earth? Was it chipped from a dollhouse window or a diamond fjord? If the deepest bass virtuoso intones the nethermost D, will this sliver fly off to reunite with its source, setting off a flood of healing…