No, don’t look back
Don’t long for it
Don’t stand dry with memory
in a future made of wind
Tag Archives: poetry
Am I reducing you?
How can I help but reduce you?
Even now I’ve no line
to show you’re more
than I can see or say.
So stay, please,
and forgive me.
Forgive and watch
these passing fields,
and be the same
old friend to me.
Laetare
I don’t like the stupid part
of being a disciple –
how you have to learn
the same lessons again and again,
fight the same fights,
and offer the same apologies
thirty years in a row.
I’m sick to death
of thinking I get it –
feeling contrite at Mass,
all that wet-eyed resolve
and the light shining on
just the right window
at just the right time –
until you’re again coughing, after,
over your coffee, sputtering
your justifications and wondering
secretly if God Himself is not choking,
ready finally to keep His promise
and spit you from His mouth!
Unburdened by apples
I took apples across
the country and back.
I didn’t shine them,
I didn’t eat them,
I didn’t even know I had them.
They lay hidden beneath
a coat in my bag.
They’re perfect, perfect,
potentially perfect.
May you, like me,
be unburdened by apples.
Love makes another scene
Going overboard again,
overdramatizing,
forgetting there are limits
to what people can take,
how they don’t want to hear it,
not in a restaurant
or ever,
all the fool convictions, thinking
she can fix things,
hoping again, when all we want
is to be left alone
Of tea and mementoes
He spoke and I listened
every time there and back
We wore
a deep path of memory
through the war and
subsequent years –
clockmaker stories,
composers,
my house and his
I could see mine
across the street
How much line?
How far do you let it go
before you reel it back in?
And how big is exactly
the fish you’re trying to catch?
And how smart and strong are you?
And can you swim?
Thank you, Mr. Kays
I walked a metaphysic of trust,
that line of no width we posited at school.
There were no buildings on either end,
but you didn’t need them.
Once you could get
from a point to a line,
the rest was easy.
Planes rose to welcome your feet.
Legendary last reunions
Of the family
when everyone was still there –
brass-knuckle voices, the ball game,
lawn chairs and drinks
with maraschino cherries –
“You jackass! No wonder
he walked away” –
barbecue sauce black
and two outs for the closer –
another win for the Cubs
in an otherwise winless year
Midnight blue
Love casts out fear
Hence I found myself
three trees from the big house
working my way back
one black trunk at a time
Utrecht Journal 