Category: Poems
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Brendan’s Quest
This land is leprous with the huts of men; Their radishes are crisp and strong but now this soil is wounded. It is the sea that’s never wounded since it mends like Naaman’s flesh behind our wind-plow. Our fathers told the truth: “Ignore the images, my son: they’re barnacles of spirit holding you in harbor…
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Sassafras, Hazel, Arbutus
On watching mother die at the nursing home. Just once, an instant once in one whole life when winter lances membranes in the hazel leaves releasing waters from the bloods of red, just once the colors on the hills forget each other, blink, and shift to window chairs to stare the wind. Now this.…
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Not Many Things Are Needful
Not many things are needful: peaches, silent, in blue stoneware; sunbeams, silent, on the sisal rug; roses, leaning, sipping from their vase. One thing left strewn from late last year would clutter all. So much is poised on where the roses sit; maybe on the bar, maybe on the hutch. So much is poised on…
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Grover’s Gourds, September
When sap fills out these vines it sluices juice to dizzy tendrils turning airy curls with thirsty whorls; it climbs too high, then stops and drops and swells the gourds to pendulous tumescence. Stems are stretching, water-weighted, steeping cherokee beneath the sun. Early summer storms stormed up these roots, headstrong; then settled, though, at noons, in…
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O Vocative!
When Eckhart taught of inner birth and death I underlined his book and wept into my hand: O vocative! O Christendom! (Not like the scribes, that voice.) When Tauler taught of inner death and birth I lay aside his book and wept into my hands. Not like the scribes, that voice. O vocative. O Christendom.
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No-one On The Stairs
I, too, have read a book of lyrics before dawn. The birds were waking slowly on the lawn with not-yet-morning, browsing-in-the-modes attempts at song. I, too, was glad the roads were silent as the silk the geisha wears. No-one in the parlor, no-one on the stairs.
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Collect for Nostalgia Sunday
At the bottom of the sea and seldom seen earth’s bowels begin: an enigmatic maze whose passages volute upon each other (lost, the traveler there). Sickening, the sense of rushing night, of sudden distance gone when once the dragon’s doors are passed. Those doors suspend upon a one-way hinge and let no traveler back. Lift…
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Moon Sonnet
I’d say you didn’t find it as you, hoping,flipped the pages of the Book of Women’s Curses(while I hovered like those hospice nurses,in a hush). I’d say you, fiercely hoping,didn’t draw this blood when you’d concoctthe proofs that God is dark, that He coercestears. But now, I sense the brine my versessound to you. A…
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Purgation Visits In The Night
Are you weary yet? I am. Then rest. I don’t know how to rest. Then die. I don’t know how to die. Just love your friends. I have no friends. Then you’re not weary yet.