With nothing but where I am, home,
for my destination, I forgo foes and
calamities for mild
surprises: ice and reeds and
sliding fowl,
a family afoot,
two dogs who join and guide me.
Tag Archives: poetry
Mercy was a schoolyard word
Mercy was a schoolyard word,
the key unlocking the grip of the bully,
something I saw often enough
but normally (neatly, nimbly)
dodged myself. God did thus
himself a disservice, putting
his good word first in the
mouth of the enemy who demanded it –
of his victim no less.
And this was part of a larger pattern,
I saw, God betting on the wrong horse,
dumping his treasures in the mud,
thinking all-screwed-up might make
the good, the true and the beautiful
self-evident.
Oh I’ll admit:
I never see the truth better
than when I’m wrong
or love purity more
than when I’ve sinned.
So maybe this is just the way.
But why?
Why must dark
dress up our day?
To the divine railway engineer
Who would be verticaling
what horizontal was,
namely this track,
hooking a chain to the train
so we won’t fall
Psalm 151: Or, of broken women and a host of drug-addicted men
I don’t watch zombie shows but know something about what
emerges from thy dank wood in the boonies, Lord –
have as need be hid behind equal trees,
backing and circling ever outward, dodging
hands and cool blank eyes, upward yes
into the air, “free” of it all, now, over there.
But you, wide and ghostly, neither leave nor solve
but hang, steady as the mist, as drops on ferns,
spores of the underside, your heart
rotting out the log. Till when? – we change?
Your breath is gone, but hold it still.
For we’ll not, ever, no matter what we’ve got,
(hell if we will)
change.
Love keeps going down
Love keeps going down
to the lowest places.
Why not let it go,
I wonder,
but no.
You’ll have that too.
Insatiable
are You.
Weather report
I myself am that cloud
blotting God out,
the snow
drifting the fence
The Missed Tackle
How can all your life compress to a single moment
and all of it be air after all, you perfectly placed by your miss
to see every second of the consequence, your rival
(who you’d have dropped every other time
with ease) now galloping free, strutting in fact,
into the end zone with the prize –
all his life now made
in that one second
that was once
yours.
Two standard deviations from the norm
That’s not that far, really. I’d have thought
you needed to go further to be significant
in this day and age. Hell, two deviations,
I get those in before breakfast, and we’re
not even close yet to considering those places
where people usually go astray.
Rattling cup
He’s gonna rattle that cup rattle rattle
till I turn around.
His bones will fill that cup rattle rattle
before my change will.
Rattle rattle, rattle rattle rattle
A room’s never too small
It was the Pope, I believe, who said
we shouldn’t close our eyes when praying,
that we could get stuck in there.
I had my eyes open when I read this,
and often do, but he’s right about
delicious doors closed against the world.
You can back up forever closing door after door.
A room’s never too small to hold another door.
Utrecht Journal 