We all knew it would come.
Someday. Always later.
Mañana.
It comes for us all. Sure.
Of course.
We know that. Someday.
Mañana.
But when someday draws near
for someone you love
whose silenced breath sears
your lungs with flames of grief
and sobs so immense
you wonder:
How dare the sun ascend?
The stars to shine?
Even the yeast to rise!
Eschewing perfection, they knotted in a flaw,
the human signature and kink that made
the carpet whole -- not less perfect, but more
for the fraying edge, the bleeding dyes
that cloak their treasure in disguise,
an act of indirection modeled from on high:
as when the Deity said Be ...
and out crawled -- the twisted,
the crippled, the deformed.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
Touched your hem / A thousand times / A face just / Beyond my sight / Space between / Grace, grief
My husband, he die
without water in desert.
Walking Saudi Arabia --
no jobs in Yemen
for policemen
from Somalia.
My strokes are halting, not like the imagined fluidity
of the monastic scribes, hunched, by candlelight,
over some ancient text, perhaps the Our Father,
being deftly rendered in the thin black liquid
of a gently dipped quill.
From their sublime to my ridiculous work
in colored calligraphy markers
purchased at the local drugstore.
But my text is the same, the Our Father;
except mine is printed on the inside jacket
of the pocket edition of a scriptural rosary book,
printed and published a mere forty years ago.
Bach wrote his solo cello suites as études, not for performance./
Imagine, the arpeggios of the first prelude, forever private, /
His friend Martha's making soup, because you still /
have to eat. Meanwhile, back in the Garden /
No, nothing,
she says, that is not God’s, and we approach
a crow ripping the entrails
of a truck-crushed fox, and the crow flees
The hospital chaplain who sits in the room of a sick child
in Chicago and brings the child to God—not with words
but by her quiet presence.
Over chatter of starlings and grackles,
you hear your father’s voice,
confident and constant as bee hum
in the backyard of your thoughts.
Somebody noticed this quaking purplish spray
hung incongruous on late-winter's bough,
and tied a festive bow of multicolored yarns
to cheer the anomalous blossoms,
Alb: A white liturgical tunic worn as prayer for a heart protected from all stain and washed in the Blood of the Lamb.
Because I lay on my back as a boy in the grass of the small yard behind our house watching clouds move and become faces, mostly,
Of all the saints, my Anthony,
I love you best. For you did
what I long to do: you walked away
from a life of comfort and ease,
This is the Month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heav’ns eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
