Grand Isle
for Edgar Bowers, i.m. The clouds this night collapse with violence Into themselves, the frothing Gulf their score, Then rise to forge a new design, each tense With struggle to hold form, impermanence Their constant state. Below, the fitful shore Endeavors to maintain a faithful line, Establishing frail boundaries once more, Demanding less than what…
Eternities
The first eternity is things, the second our imagining, the third my soul, flying out to her, donning the purple robe she sewed, Wisconsin winter, thirty years ago. Purple, the color of a king. I wear that robe New Orleans June. Of the wounds, this is just one. I asked our priest to bring her…
Teele Square Sunday Morning, Summer 2001
Just as I saunter down the front porch stair Into the brilliant light of Sunday morning, My collar pressed, pants creased, and without care, As if the world shrugged off all signs of mourning, I catch sight of the dive bar on Teele Square. And there, left blinking, helpless, lost in light, …
A Recurrent Longing for Something Else: A Review of Motherland by Sally Thomas
Able Muse Press, 126 pages, $19.95 “You try/ to sort through images cluttering your mind’s dark attic,” says the opening poem, “Change Ringing”, of Sally Thomas’s debut collection Motherland, as if to announce the book’s humble preoccupations—a mere rummage round in the poet’s private memory. But that picture quickly complicates as she works out what…
If truth be told…
That was a way of putting it —T.S. Eliot, East Coker Conditional, at best. In other words. Needless to say. When all is said and done. Thinking things through. Seeing them. So to speak. A word to the wise. Better left unsaid. What isn’t golden: falling into place. The word made flesh, or was the…
Trinities
I the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost (I John 5: 7) The spirit, the Word, and the Father –Three in One – from eternity, gatheredThe earth, sky, and waters together. II the spirit and the water and the blood (I John 5: 8) The spirit, the water, the bloodBear witness on earth…
Words
Let me not hasten words, as wind the leaves Of fretful autumn’s dissipating dither, Which all the rains of spring, and breath he breathes, Fail utterly to wake or make un-wither. May buds that burgeon out from tender reaching, Rooted deep in thoughts that take their time Ripen most from patience’ trammels teaching Tendrils surely,…
The Rose Window
by Rainer Maria Rilke In there, the languid pacing of their paws creates a stillness that can almost daze; then one of the great cats abruptly draws your gaze (which periodically strays) forcefully into its great eye, and there your gaze, held fast as if within the whirl of a maelstrom, stays afloat a little…
Postscript: at the ruins of St Mary on the Rocks, St Andrews
From Caledonian Postcards Was it just legal fiction brought us here?The batteryIs silent on the question, gone cold for fearThey’d wake the dead. They won’t but you know me—A “ruin bibber,” unreformed, Romantic. The morning’s clear, if cold. I sit in choir,Intone a requiem in foreign diction.Communed with gulls, asperged by the Atlantic,Would that I sang…