More on: poetry

What matters is what occurs occurs Between them, not to them. It’s only that The angel doesn’t matter, nor the virgin. A blade of light scissors the air Between them. To them it’s only that: A glancing blow, or a kind of cleaving, A blade of light. Scissor the air Wide open, then it happens:…

He made the Leviathan for the sport of it, The Lord of my childhood. Her fluke The size of two sleek rowboats For lifting and drawing down Knifelike into the water Or for slapping—so many gestures A fluke or fin can make with or Without ruin. I remember A whale rolling sideways Just—it appeared—so I…

She is a mother first—in every church she lights a candle for her harrowed son. One already lit supplies the match. Today San Stefano, above her stretched a heaven of dark keel vaulting. Here an icon, Byzantine, true presence in the church of the second Eve, the mother she beseeches. She gives a euro to…

From nothing God made everything, they said. Nothing plus God is nothing we said. But with something to work with, look what we’ve done. God said, you’d better and you’d better not, they said. And sometimes it looks like you have when you shouldn’t. Eyewash, we said, it’s just how we are, honeyed self-interest in…

When everything has left you, at the end, the world will come down to a few old words you will see new because you’ve chosen to. Your last breath will be like my first today. So I start here, in that extremity— or is it just simplicity I’ve earned by learning to be, the page…

Down the long road leading me back to me I saw my holy friends. I called hello. This is not allegory. Mind me well. I do not speak in tongues or prophecy. I talk in the plain speech of poetry, which is to say, the morning gives me stars, leftover nights from which to fabricate…

My father thought the Anglican liturgy pure poetry, once, Three hundred people chanting in the multi-colors of the chancel, Saying on cue We do! Though they might have answered Otherwise in their own living rooms, together They committed to many things, the dignity Of every human being, the baby lifted high above My father’s head,…

Psalm Ghazal I   Touch the cheek of a child and God comes in through the fingers. Open your mouth, and the devil comes in or the devil goes out. Flatter with your tongue the wine and then the hollow inside my hip. At the request of your lips, my mourning turns to dancing. Only…