Faces stir the surface

of glassed-in caskets.

Your voice, from years ago:

I wanted something I couldn’t name.

As when the falcon

sees its shadow far below.

Outside: fountains, sunlight.

Sheen of thigh and apple.

Sparrows bathe beneath

a dross of sky.

You left as if there was

somewhere else to be.

(New South)

The ships flamed in the harbor.

What city did they defend?

We shivered in the skull

of a blue whale winched up

to the pines where the doves

dripped like burning wax

and harebells wilted

on the battlements;

the earthen mounds, piled tires,

salvaged relics—Lincoln’s head,

the Wall Street bull, a gravestone

from Shiloh, where feral hogs

feasted in the peach orchard

on the wounded and the dead—

Mundus senescit. The bodies like

driftwood on the trinitite beach.

Our sex a failed prayer—

Lord, will you not restrain us?

(Gettysburg Review)

The clinking of chains, ruins of cities,

narrow gates creaking open toward the sea.

Pumpjacks clawing at the cracked caliche.

A toppled obelisk, wild dogs circling

the iron ribs of a behemoth ship.

An atlas of skins, chalices of ash,

the blurred whirling blades of a tin windmill.

A crow soaring backwards over vacant

cratered airfields and derelict railyards.

Half-crescent coppers, a welding helmet,

riveted hieroglyphs of dying stars.

White silk scarves gliding over obsidian

tablets and the backside of god, passing

like the dark flash of an abyssal fish.

(Spoon River Poetry Review)

Oar blades, vast swirls

of cirrus at dawn.

The dead move within us

in unmoored astronomies.

Sometimes the song

of the hermit thrush

cascades like a coin

through light-struck water.

We are the rain drops

on the glass of the lake.

(Narrative)

The sky, and the scent

of the sky in the river.

The river, and the scent

of the river, running

wild beneath the violets.

The violets, aglow

at dusk, and a voice

like birdsong, sloping softly

down, through the trees,

calling a name like yours

to a place almost lost,

nearly out of sight now,

lilting on the dream dark

rise of the river’s drift.

(Midwest Review)

Donatello, Prophet with Scroll.

Blessed be the apraxic herald,

the battered handle of heaven’s rasp.

Afflicted physician, anointed thistle.

Tattered tent pitched amidst the palaces.

For he who sees will see the nations

float like chaff above a shepherd’s cookfire;

he who hears will flee wild dogs and whispers,

and wake to the creak of the potter’s wheel.

Yet his hands will gather the fallen clay,

and unseal the scrolls stretching to Sheol,

where it is written: in your abandonment

you are beloved; in exile you are saved.

(Image)

after George Seferis

The clock hand turns,

a snake writhes

beneath the hand.

Our rituals drained,

we keep the ledger

of rain’s end, descending

through the trees.

Still, there are spaces

opening, opening

between the peals

of bells—

there is no snake

there is no hand

amen.

(New South)

Mathew 10:29-31

We roared in ecstasy, raised our ARs and ripped

the sky in victory, above our enemies as they fled,

and our rifle tips, how they fluttered and dipped

like sparrows in the wind, and our lead

fell by chance, or not, and a piece split

the skull of a child crawling over the dead,

and how, then, we numbered our thoughts

like the hair, beneath the helmets on our heads.

(The Normal School)

Shut down, abandoned and half-dismantled

high on the beach between coastal towns,

the great wheel creaks and moans, spokes

poking through the fog, it stands, sand-swept

and tide-rusted, gutted by gray, and below,

in the thin grasses, lay the gears and wires

and bulbs, the half-buried bones of some god’s

bicycle, pedaled ashore and long outgrown.

(Atlanta Review)

There are still songs to sing beyond humankind. –Paul Celan.

A glaucoma of stone narrows the night

to a light-flecked slit of iris sky

where Jupiter slurs an oblique passage,

hauling his high court to Halley’s applause—

cosmic debris showers the mesosphere

with faint scratches of ephemeral light.

The scene wheels across my keyhole of earth,

or rather, time—tail visible, trailing

through tinted stratums, the eons unveiled

in the annals of water’s slow caress.

§

The water’s caress, fleeting Arabic

of the hummingbird, floating to flower;

the windblown journey of the arctic tern,

blue whales breaching at twilight, deep spirals

of interstellar bodies—migrations

by which I live, quietly unaware,

perceiving less than I can fathom,

I name more than I can know. Breath by breath

I am eclipsed; my days diffused like dusk,

falling on the gauze of a mayfly’s wing.

§

A mayfly’s wing, lilting on the river,

spinning over stones, adrift on swift song.

The symphony echoes in far gardens,

behind doors, on stars dead before our birth—

What name do we give the note after awe?

The night narrows to a man’s face, aglow

as he stirs the last embers, his thoughts

like one who steps out onto a terrace

at dawn, above a city of dark spires,

then turns back, toward a century of sleep.

(Image)