More on: poetry

–after Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia In the garden, all the apples have returned to us, dangling gold leaf shiny from the trees, and under their bowers we walk, our drowsy feet crushing the flowers, carnations, pinks, violas, dahlias— All of our dead have returned to us, their faces wrinkled with the labor of the…

I am hollowing a dwelling        in the granite of my heart. I am thinking then to torch       its walls, and sweep out all debris with a green, a heavy branch       of rosemary. I mean to chip a niche inside       therein to rest a…

1. One’s waking of itself obtains _____a rising and—one might say—a dazed, __________surprising glee at having met within sleep’s netherworld one’s own _____dim shadowed psyche, and survived. One’s walking soon thereafter well _____into the morning’s modest glare __________proves—if all goes swimmingly—yet further evidence of being _____obliquely well attended, proves discreetly provident of one’s _____invisible surround…

This, then, is the complete game: disappearance and return. ——————————————————————Freud [In craps, the “point” is a dice-cast that must be rolled again before a seven to win the bet. Seven, though, is the most common cast, so the odds always disfavor any repetition of the point.] I came to all the senses that would come…

What is this world but the absence of God, his withdrawal, his distance (which we call space), his waiting (which we call time), his footprint (which we call beauty)? God could only create the world by withdrawing from it (otherwise there would be nothing but God), or by remaining in the form of absence, hiddenness,…

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul, O I say now these are the Soul! —Walt Whitman By the second week in September nuthatches capture the last elderberries, excrement purpled and extravagant, sprayed drunkenly across my truck’s hood. I’ve been thinking about the God…

He is walking across a field of wheat in Kansas, grain as tall as his shoulder and as tan as his face. He is cupping his hands to his mouth, shouting words the wind steals and throws into the air like chaff. I need to know what he’s said and begin chasing his voice as…

after “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness” by Simon Wiesenthal I All day I’ve been beating my breast, begging pardon of those I’ve offended: family, estranged friends, and ex-dates. Cleaning the slate, the Rabbi calls it each erev Yom Kippur. I’ve even emailed that asshole out west with the broad-brim hat and…

Years ago somebody decided—I don’t know how this conclusion was reached—that the most beautiful phrase in the English language was cellar door. —Don DeLillo, interviewed in the Paris Review, 1993 i. cellar door / cellar door ———————–Two solid wooden doors hinged to open out leaning on a sloping ledge against the house. Within, a wooden…

Today I saw a man who looked away when he asked the clerk where he might find pepper- corn sauce in a packet. He held a muscled bit of stringy steak. Both man and meat had the gray look of shades swept from a cave. Sent to aisle three, the man wandered, head down, on…