How Beautiful the Beloved
By Poetry Issue 54
Occult power of the alphabet— How it combines And recombines into words That resurrect the beloved Every time. ________Breaking open The dry bones of each Letter—seeking The secret of life That must be hidden inside. § Fate not just a pair of scissors Waiting at the end to cut the thread, But there at the…
Read MoreThe Cartographer of Disaster
By Poetry Issue 54
And he sent forth a raven and it went back and forth, to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. —Genesis 8:7 To traverse open water searching for signs of life, a seabird is more suited than a land bird, which needs the trustworthy stubble of wheat fields and faithful…
Read MoreDenise Levertov: A Memoir and Appreciation
By Essay Issue 27
The first time I saw Denise Levertov was in the spring of 1973. She was the Elliston Poet at the University of Cincinnati that semester, and she was standing in the aisle prior to delivering the Elliston lecture. She was bent forward talking to someone seated at the end of a row of chairs. She…
Read MoreTongue Is the Pen
By Poetry Issue 86
Isaiah 43 I am making all things new! Or am trying to, being so surprised to be one of those guys who may be dying early. This is yet one more earthen declaration, uttered through a better prophet’s more durable mouth, with heart astir. It’s not oath-taking that I’m concerned with here, for what that’s…
Read MoreQuestion for My Father
By Poetry Issue 86
When I look up, into the needles of the cypress tree, brown in November, I see cinnamon—I see wood of violins, breast feathers of the sedge wren, a setter’s fur, toasted grain…. I see the cypress glowing within a cloudless noon, pale blue at horizon as background of a Botticelli annunciation, that turns unpaintably, achingly…
Read MoreFolding a Five-Cornered Star So the Corners Meet
By Poetry Issue 86
This sadness I feel tonight is not my sadness. Maybe it’s my father’s. For having never been prized by his father. For having never profited by his son. This loneliness is Nobody’s. Nobody’s lonely because Nobody was never born and will never die. This gloom is Someone Else’s. Someone Else is gloomy because he’s always…
Read MoreA Prayer for Home
By Poetry Issue 86
This November, the pears are as hard as wood but taste like the honeysuckle I used to pick from the chain-link fence in the alley, nipping the end and drawing the stamen out, slowly, until that one sweet drop beaded at the bottom—one of the houses is wild with honeysuckle. When I came to You…
Read MoreCreed in the Santa Ana Winds
By Poetry Issue 86
You believe He’s stronger than the desert wind butting against the fence, wind that ignites sagebrush, tears through the hills and strips the houses to ash. Despite your lips that crack till blood comes, skin that grows rough between your fingers, you believe He will be solid to your touch the way the bay is…
Read MoreCanticle of Want
By Poetry Issue 86
Lord of worn stone cliffs and the guileless trill of the canyon wren; Lord of stunted hemlocks, imperiled mussels, seeds that fall on shallow soil; Lord of boreal forests, of the fragile nitrogen cycle, of vanishing aquifers, spreading deserts; Lord of neglect and…
Read MoreReading George Herbert
By Poetry Issue 63
All he ever wanted was to disappear. But he kept coming upon himself as if he were a character in a story who, despite his best efforts to understand, remained inscrutable. How he tried to keep straight the difference between who the author said he was and who he thought he was. He told himself…
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