Go to the Cyclops, to their metalworks, to buy your armaments—
Poetry
The summer God was nine years old
Heaven's swamp cooler broke for good.
His Mama was stout yet managed to scale
the side of their trailer, parked off a path
near the woods over by Gabriel's.
She jerry-rigged its fan to flutter
with the backing off her green and purple earring.
God was building insects that day
under the shade of the grapevines by the tree.
He pinched that colorful tool,
ran off for the quiet of his overhanging vines.
Easing the earring out of his overalls
he mimicked his Mama an historic way that day.
I once met a woman who—
in a frenzy of wild praise
and to fight the devil—ate glass.
Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in
solitude and in the times of
solitude as, for
example, in the earliest morning. Wallace Stevens
Very soon now the light shall die.
The Great World will be rent—
ashes, sobbing seraphim, calves
born with crabbed feet. Rain
then the absence of rain.
Wild thunder pounds in my head.
I didn’t follow the holy man around
I never sat down to a meal with him
Loving him began this way: water
poured into emptiness
the bowl filling