From far-out depths they come,
swell swelling swell,
'til cresting they salute the sky
and tumble towards sand that waits immemorially
to receive them.
Summer u
The narcotraficante commanded me
in gestures, take off your blouse.
Then he jerked it, scattering buttons—
smooth and pink—along the ground.
"The wind blows wherever it pleases." Word?
The scene is played out. We need some Eden!
Were Abba the DJ, He'd spin hymns
To slay.
It's comical, sir
I went there once,
to the place you’re imagining.
It was purple, with wild geraniums
under green-bright stars.
All the constellations spelled
words, like &
After the olive groves at Samothrace and fog
which billowed up from a green sea,
the rocky sheep path and bleating ewes,
wind and sun—there w
She left
with her sack of stones
and one dying rose,
fragrant as Pinot Noir.
Your letter through the slot
slid to the floor and lay quite still
all day, until returning home from work
I seized and tore it open.
If ever you have wakened in the night—
the steep blue night, and waited for the tears—
then I must tell you—
Driving east on Jackson Street one morning,
only a couple of blocks from the bungalow on Abe Street
where a few years ago hundreds of people claimed
to see the reflection of the Virgin in an upstairs window,
I noticed that the diner with the orange awnings
was advertising “fish wings” and found myself wondering
whether fish wings might be some Asian delicacy
Was the cry they heard a kestrel’s or a distressed gull
or a passing soul or one not wanting to, a disciple
asked as fog burned off the harbor and left the water
glazed with fire: Jesus roused from dozing lightly. Sun
turned the shore rocks ocher. A bee thrummed near;
they watched it hover. John, who squatted to mend a net,
beneath debris and stench
a hand
your hand withered
stretched forth
waiting for someone’s
be healed
my mother bleeds for me in a barn
she gives birth in a tree as the flood waters rise
she is a refugee
my mother bends and gathers
she pounds and sweats to quiet many hungers
she is a worker
my mother calls for mercy
she forms pieces of sky into shapes that heal
she is a maker