Poets’ Corner
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Februarys
When I am tempest-torn and grief-lorn, shredded by the weight of my own self against the spider-silk weft of this heavy world; when I lose my nerve or head and begin to bargain with castles I have built – offer them more grit, more stone, more water, argue they are not porcelain; when I look…
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Meditation on West Maroon Pass
10,432 feet I reach the miner’s ruined cabin, Each year more like a stack of weathered timber Sinking from sight in the grass. Around the bend, the scene: Alpine Whiproot arcs from green, gentians spear The sun, and, above me, the pass. Here dwarf hawksbeard still lurks and sparks. Lilies and bluebells burn, where willow…
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June, Henry County
In the dead afternoon, June’s hands meet the water, submerging each dish and raising it clean. The children are at school. Nothing breathes, not even the curtains stir. Through the window, June watches The ancient mare and wonders if she remembers That stallion who, years ago, sired The spring foal. Perhaps the old horse too…
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Dawn in the Fall of My Thirtieth Year
And through Tudor windows opens antique timbre— old-forge steel, tempered and flank-fitted for war horses, makes seize-music on meat-pistons that mean plunder: As if. ………For I know a construction truck’s shuddering out its raised dumper, and the sun is a vinegar sponge. And You slowly thumb up Your pure pressure. Let me will to possess…
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Freude: On Hearing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony after a Two-Year Pandemic Delay
The master couldn’t hear his work, but here we are listening together— where the flowing waters meet— to Beethoven’s final symphony. The contrasts and crescendos at times too much: a smile releases the mind’s discomfiture. The trumpet player drinks some water, waiting for his chance, the ringing choir is a morose tribunal peering down on…
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Tyndale
Your words, six hundred years old, fill our minds: my brother’s keeper and let there be light, it came to pass and seek and ye shall find, plain-put so in faith we’ll fight the good fight. What’s that you said? The boy who drives the plow should know more of the scriptures than a priest?…
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Our Equinox
For Adriano The kids emerge to afternoon from ancient doors At St. Mary’s, pre-Ks eager to dash and hide Around the green at Gregory College House. It’s hard to tell which one’s mine, which is yours, As they frolic and tumble, dive and slide Down grass, spin a circle,…
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Post-Blizzard
I A haggard rabbit sits in the shadows of the eaves of the house, looking out at the snowbound yard with its marble eye and wondering what we’re all wondering: how am I supposed to get through this? Up the street someone has revved a snow blower and begun chugging down the sidewalk in the…
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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…
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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…