Abundant in the air,
thwacks and grimacing jaws –
a cracked wall in the one frame,
rubble in the next –
a nuclear flash
and,
at last,
the muffling down,
a caroling
in paper soft as spring
Tag Archives: poetry
What rain was like in a parking lot in P.A.
It’s not at all but
I’ll say it, like
open-heart
surgery
and not in rivulets
but sheets
and who knew
the pavement sloped down?
Sleep as snow
You could fall back down
into it,
flailing until the angel arises
to be the you,
the better day
I’ve kept from you my resurrections
I’ve folded them up and boxed them
(in a brown box, no more).
You’ll want no gloating, no
easy answers – Sentimental, I think
you’ll say – so I take my sunlit
paths of pine needles, my sugar-berried
friendship – and flatten and tuck them
into a neat remembrance
all for myself.
Nests revealed in the tallest of trees
Their secret rides our own whistled word,
for this and every
bird’s a love bird.
Mr. Schilling makes the most of it
They’ll be tightening the chain
on my bike today. I’ll be done with
slipping and clacking.
Slick steel will join intentions to powers.
You’ll see where I’ve been when I’ve gone on by.
After breakfast but long before the lunch
A man speaks on the bus to another man who hears voices (I hear this man, and the voice in my own head, but not the man on the other end of the line) and I wonder how the other man knows it’s not real, and a thing he should ignore. And all the many voices in my own head persist, and I wonder which is real, and how I know the difference.
Quite content with the alternative
I lay by my wife and felt her fingers,
and then all her bones together –
a skeletal, scary thought
with a cold wind blowing through it –
so I hastened to add the rest,
first the organs and then the
blood and tissues I couldn’t name,
and finally the skin and
mass of golden hair.
But even then she wasn’t herself,
so I started decking her out
with all her qualities, her smile and
hard soft-heartedness,
her way of leaving things
and that twist when she dances.
And how she cooks, with her million recipes,
and curls up in the corner of the couch.
The further I went, the warmer she,
and the drowsier I,
got, and God it’s good
to sleep with her
and not with that bag of bones!
Michael the Archangel on a platform of the station
Reaching for a tissue, I found him
in the pocket of my coat.
I’d forgotten we’d prayed to him
and I’d do it again in these days
short on light and breath.
But I hadn’t done it,
and now he stood before me
on a platform of the station.
Angels go where men won’t go
They come when you’re not there
Pray quick today before they come
For distance makes a safer prayer
L’esperance
On passing
(the) untroubled younger siblings
playing hopscotch – not only
untroubled, but joyous –
and remembering (being older)
one who had died, one who
their older sister
and brother knew,
and recalling, too,
the once and still
vacant look in their mother’s eyes.
Utrecht Journal 