Which was dragging things
out to the bitter last moment,
watching possibilities fly
like cocks crowing
unhinged, remembering
Nietzsche said, The deed
is everything, and that
was in ’92 when I was
going to meet him in the ring
that very day!
Tag Archives: poetry
One of several principles of hospitality
When you’re here I
want you to be in a
bright, clear world.
Briefly. For briefly
is all I can manage.
After briefly comes
the usual. Do you
hear it in that word
usual?
How slow and cloudy
it is, clearly
not knowing
what it ever
will be about.
Still wondering
A question-mark of flowers
circles the tree.
The gardener could not
help but ask.
Why I love my wife
As I dress she asks,
Another day at the
wood-chopping farm?
And yes, it does begin
in a kind of wood
where trees pose a problem,
physically or metaphorically,
and you wouldn’t want one
landing wrong in either case.
My chopping, of course,
being but a form of bewilderment,
won’t bring one down, but
you’re right to note, dear,
my attire would well serve
the man who could.
A significant complication
How is it to hunger
for words others can’t say?
They can’t say them
for they wouldn’t be true,
and who doesn’t bleed
for a bit of integrity?
But they want to say them,
to fill the hunger.
Thus does one hunger beget
another, and eventually
a famine.
Lost Lamentation
I’m on fire and swimming in a pool.
I’m swimming underwater and still on fire.
But nothing burns
but me
Can I make out of words
Can I make out of words
what I wanted to get on film?
Ten seconds of the freight train
rumbling by?
And a boy biking,
his pedal striking
the kickstand loose
and useless?
With a proper hoe / The harrowing
Won’t there be endless
progress into the past
and won’t we find there
everyone no one
ever heard of,
and won’t they stand
and flourish finally,
just as they’d hoped?
I, Barabbas
Christ to death
while the guilty man goes free.
And a white-hot freedom it is –
one better left alone.
Better to putter behind
shades and abstractions,
to sleep the many sleeps
that bring us our own.
Where believers go when God arrives
Your light is flooding this tract.
It has soaked the grass
and risen up through the brush
to fill the trees.
And so we must flee.
We climb the trees to await
boats of darkness
that will take us to caverns
cool and
covered with moss.
Where we’ll wait, to see what You do.
Utrecht Journal 