More on: time

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…

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…

Holy Week again:             unleavened sky, all tensions held past hold. Mostly, what I feel is the unlikelihood. These days, pick a miracle,             there’s science to explain it. Say it’s nighttime in the Garden, Jesus praying in a bloody sweat: Hematidrosis—rare; not unknown—            …

Imagine someday the splurge drains out of fall. Holding a melon you know a creek of light streams inside its rough burlap ball, but if you cut it open you know stars will fall extinguished in the dark. You know the quarrel of the squeaky porch swing, know the cold that stacks goldfish like knives…

Each man has a silence that revolves around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka and toast the white wall. I say we were never silent. We read each other’s lips and said one word four times. And laughed…

I I am looking for the letter that arrived after Uncle Sol’s death. The one that says: The war is over! Love to Kayla, X-O-X. I even searched back through the cardboard box, opening each envelope in precise reverse order— sorry for the lapse between this missive and the last— watching their lives drawing closer…

ARE YOU CONVINCED that everything is going to hell in a handbasket? Down the tubes? Or are you possessed of a more sanguinetemperament? Do you feel that life is getting better every day in every way? Do you believe in progress or regress? What would the make and model of your handbasket happen to be?…

You let your feet decide how to walk it, andante or andantino— only allow your breathing to become what wind is in the eucalyptus, now a susurrus, now a slow erasure of distractions. Cries from the soccer field and the street noise in Skala dissolve in the attention the stones require you give each footfall.…

1 the droning dies down, the sea steps back, leaving salt on stone foreheads, on the years’ shells and that which we so stubbornly call poetry. come, sit here, on this wind and wave crumbled shore and let’s be silent for so long, till night lowers eyelids on the open sea and no one remembers…

Farther away the closer it gets, time outwits science. This fossil is how many millions of years old? The same age as my pain. Love laughs at swagger, men sleepless over their calculators. The invisible enemy decks himself out to keep me from saying what makes me eternal: O world! I’ve loved you ever since…