You’ve bailed
on your watery world
and are screaming now
in the bird-soaked air.
Tag Archives: poetry
Howl of a hound
In a crayon sky of midnight blue.
You turn white
at the sight
of his teeth.
Comes a time
He came to me hang-dog,
sat down on the porch
of the little cabin I had.
Was there anything for
the misty trail and blank diffusion,
the locked-out midlife
and dry, throat-clearing
apology for not having done
– what?
He didn’t even know,
only that it was bad.
And what did I have
to offer? Nothing but
my own head hung,
the cracked and weathered grain
of the planks under my feet,
and the assumption that I wouldn’t
be in his shoes
twenty years hence.
With your invisible pull
You have held me to this earth.
I am no projectile,
no space-junk flying.
Blue blood
She had, surprisingly, not
the perfect flaw
of a few fine lines –
a hairline crack
in Delftware –
but that more pronounced blemish,
a varicose vein.
Or, as one once put it,
a very-close vein,
very close to you and me.
I’m getting rich from poetry
And you can, too!
Just sweat a brick
as of old,
but let it be mental,
and let it be gold.
My gift is my hunger
My hunger for You
Birds dive for man’s bread
O Elijah, where have you gone?
I saw God
Well, no, a man
at church.
He held his baby boy
close to his chest,
and his daughter followed.
Oh that baby, I know,
he’ll light up and
strike out,
and dad’ll be pissed,
and when the sword is slashing
there’s cutting all around.
But through it all
there’s this:
the embrace,
and the watching eye
of the girl.
The latest vast surge
Of iniquity
starts with the usual
shift and give –
O God! –
a shudder under
some distant sea
that jumps to run invisibly
to slap and scatter
and stink and stay.
Utrecht Journal 