Issue 62

after Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise The experts are saving the prophets and their wall, ___the prophets and the law, and the door ______to paradise. What does it profit ________a man to gain the whole, the world Yet to lose, or to loose his head from the Renaissance ___and its gilt-stripped doors of bronze? ______The fire-gilded…

The sound of water over rocks is grace descending The sound of animals in the distance is the future coming toward us The sound of light sliding over light is God’s name being whispered to us The sound of a door swinging open on its hinges is our entrance into his garden There all sounds…

1 The cloak of the saint was filled with roses The cloak of the saint rose above the city The cloak of the saint was thrown over the back of a chair it slowly filled with a human form it was filled with the sound of wind It floated down the mountainside sheep it passed…

I couldn’t wrap my mouth around the vowel of your name. Your name, a cave of blue wind that burrows and delves endlessly, that rings off the walls of my drumming, lilting heart, through the tiny pulsations of my wrists, the blood in my neck. I couldn’t hold the energy of your name in my…

I will my soul to waken, and my soul does not wake. My mind busies itself, remembering forgotten songs from my adolescence. My mind recalls anything, so as not to listen. I will my hands to be calm, Lord, and they fly to my teeth to crease my nails. Lord, I will myself to be…

Where the Lord lives in heaven, is he lonely? Does our Father walk his marble floors without the company of anyone righteous? Who alone is venerable enough to keep the Lord company? My voice is small, yet I call to your house, Lord. Does the wind enter your chambers and rooms, cold and empty? Where…

Speak to me about the presence of absence. Not everything created can be seen. As the uncreated may be glimpsed from a slant. What we bring is attention— prayer in our hands, spirit in our lungs. Emptiness—but a focus on what borders and frames the space— what the space is filled by. Nothing empty of…

Last night I climbed once more the narrow ladder of my poems. I took my fine pen and turned paper into ash. What were you turned into? What did you become, after? Once you said that to write a poem is to touch the unseen. If I have touched the unseen, it has not been…

Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. —I Corinthians 15:51 After the smell of lilies filled the tiny country church; after we drove down valleys and across mountains through winter rain and fog and dissipating snow; after the funeral director took our coats and intoned…

So little is legible: glacial till, the moonlight on an iced-over ditch, The moon itself—an opal pruning hook. He could go on like this: list after list, A compendium apropos of nothing more than to place the speaker here, Pointing north, bewitched like a compass needle. Hard to make much that resembles poetry out of…