Poets’ Corner
Wring the Changes
I have known the breathless feeling of a sponge that has been wrung thoroughly and roughly above my life’s chipped sink, squeezed to the point of tearing by the chapped hands of God until my shape was nothing. Until I could not think. I have known the way one squishes at the crushing of one’s…
Dead Shall Rise
Thanks to the ubiquitous suburban aversion to rake, which I take to be a sub-function of an associated suspicion re: work, one now can see it in meatspace— as I think the new term is for “real”— most days, even in rain: the rise, as browning, skeletal, blood once red even or golden over leaves…
In the Sandbox
For L & S Sand sifting through and over your fingers: that is power enough, for you know that to build is to be divine in this small world. By your spoon and single truck, you are deified, as deliberate as—or more than—those kings of old Mesopotamia steering their kingdoms of clay. ~ ~ ~…
Two Poems
Before a Resurrection These are last hours before last hours, and the flowers, earthen syntax between sign and sign, between your life and mine, bound in silence to the ground at night, where I wait, not knowing which words to say as proof that to rise and worship is right. Rewilding We are to…
Canzoniere 349
At every hour I seem to hear the messenger she sends to me, and so I change incessantly, diminished by each passing year as my reflection turns unclear; I spurn the way I used to be. I long to know when I’ll be free although that moment should be near. How joyous it will be…
West Nickle Mines School Shooting
Man enters classroom, opens fire; Five Amish girls will die today— Doves take flight from schoolhouse spire. Two daughters cast upon the pyre Their lives in hope it might allay The man with gun who opens fire. While outside, as police conspire— the press reports, the parents pray; Doves will cry, hearts expire. Word travels…
The Collar
pulls my poverty in among the poor, tugs my stiff-necked affluence toward Jesus understudies, breathing icons I’m priest-inclined to pass on the street.
After Belatedly Watching the Ken Burns Vietnam War Documentary
Behold, I make all things new. —Revelation 21:5 Already past the middle of July, The summer I left for college, said goodbye— For weeks, not months or years, eternity— To the girl I loved, still love, I’ll always love; All summer, Vietnam, the nightly news, Men…
Two Poems from the French of Paul Claudel
The Resurrection This silence of all the centuries before me: there was no way, it had to be given up. No way to say anymore of interrogated Earth: she shut herself up. The stars set themselves to tell what they’ve seen, …
Death is swallowed up in victory
Anagram of 1 Corinthians 15:54, NKJV run! the Physician has made death burn, wove saints a garment tightly—tools to withstand rot, unspools limp sin-torn city, all without prior wrath, but establishes rich hope upon it