Street Lamp Theophany

The curve of your neckkeeps me awake, your beam threadingthrough thin curtains casting me in gold.Adorning your collar, your hem, I ama glint announcing the arrivalof someone beautiful. Unlike this daylightthat now exposes me lackluster and lost. Make me a mosquitoto twirl your face, a pearl of rainto accentuate your glow, a spider’s web of […]

Dandelions

This pasture has seena thousand suns set to seed. Now mostly greenfingers point blame at the sky. How easilythe heavens could yield to this heaviness ripewith remembrance. The eastern light suggestsa begetting that holds nothing against the stalks.The wind itself is fruit. Full and empty then the samedense absence. God created each according to its […]

Who Will Roll Away The Stone?

Can you hearthe low rumbleof their question,the imperceptible tremorof footfallswindingto the tomb? Their basketsoverflowwith aloe and myrrhand the longing to be buriedin the quietwork of anointingrather than worrying aboutthe entrance,the stone fixedbefore the mouth and the stifled heartbeaten within.But listen!Notice the fresh beat of wingpulsating the air—such a rushyou wonder every mountaindoesn’t bendin worship,sight now […]

The Lesson

Listening to Sally Barker singthe BeeGee’s To Love Somebodyconfirms I have never loved anybody. The clarity in her voice an indictmentof my childish claims otherwise—my puppy love a disguise for selfishness, her naked notes revealingthe skin you must put into it.She’s clearly mastered the breath, the release of her somebodyat that least expected momenthis body […]

Eulogy for the Eucharist

Bereft of your bodymy tongue has lostits taste for bread, for the wonderof a reappearing.The flesh wasted to skin and pit—no juice to press,no river through the cleft of your chininto the wanting caveof my mouth— that surge withinI can’t survivewithout. The heat of your breathfloodingfrom you to me. My lips chapand crackin this absence […]

Countenance

At dusk I start to seeendless combinations of letters,even poetry, can’t free me, won’t unlock the next levellike a golden key revealedby the right incantation. My soul magnifies the Lord Mary sang like she could hangthe entire universe on that line—catching some ancient breeze. If I could freeze that momentfor later dissectionI might find […]

Vane

This cock doesn’t crow three times,just spins endlesslychasing its tail featherstargeting the flow of wind. But its fletching liesnot flat, never flying off the bowto achieve a perfect rotation. Still,this betrayal hits its mark or Peter, as in a similar casewhich appears closed with a look—one straight shaft shotand the show’s over. Is that the […]

Course

Coming to this riverside, could it be me who runs swiftly while the water stands banked at my attention? Might it be like coming to from a dream in which I am bent and bent until bowed? But not at some predictable end. Jesus said, See to the hungry, the outcast, the washed up ones. […]

Transfigured

What are you hiding? Some bright phase beyond saturation, perhaps? You, a haze we can’t follow. Is it inevitable that we fall all over ourselves slick as that apple we can’t grasp? Name it a false reign, if you will, one that leaves us hotter than before it came. No matter is not the matter, […]

Rift

I am no goat, ram, or heifer—meat placed on left or right, cut in two for you to walk through. You’re smoke in the eyes hiding my lying next to never severed, never a part of that Red Sea you could plunge into. If cleansed from leprosy, the Law demands a priest to see the […]