May I

 Adoro te devote     detail: andromeda daniel chester french                                                                                                                                   Setting: maternity ward Mother: in labor nearing 40 hours Father: in the wings Director/Pediatrician:   Baby: boy yet             to arrive     Because the truth is we invent a life for them our children where we are a part of them right a part of their lives? where we are assigned some defining role to star to manage – the script is written the stage has its backdrop...

    When the Hour Pushed Ahead   Yes, the long shadows go out from the bales; and yes, the soul must part from the body: what else could it do?                           Jane Kenyon                         Twilight: After Haying   A pint of blood, I know, I know it is not the same losing a son the way you did & losing a son the way I did.  The undoneness of it.  The gone body.  How he is   wheeled to his last rooms, how he will be cooling precisely, to remove a heart a pancreas his kidneys . . .each to their now different destiny, a new haven.  They will when not in his skin when in the skin of others some boys some men some girls some women   split them...

  The True Sound of A Scythe   It’s true we can drown in waves of pity, their height & ferocity lent by the squall only shock can breed.   The gape-mouth.   The abrupt letting off, being struck like this, of the tension’s stretched heft, an imagined heaviness of the block & tackle we’ve all been all our lives bracing our weight against.   The rope like to burn the life line completely away from our palms so that later when we’re comparing scars we’ll only be able to call to mind the one and only one it all happened to, the one who now is losing it all, who stood in the cove watching something massively tidal approach them & like all shocked dumb beasts they can only do so much of the taking it all in: the water, the cloud, the oh Sweet Jesus blow out all at once let go A wind driven by the local expert Grim To pluck such freshets rootless Where they stood when the news Shook them, shook them a...

  ascension   he lifted up his hands and blessed them.  While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven.                           Luke 24: 50-51   can you see it, the hawk drawing             air up to her breast             bone, the almost    umbrella of her             wings, how they open so             like her shape, see it? like a heart,                      how the tips of her             primary feathers meet to m...

  how i   how I peer how I try   to penetrate   the in- terior   of your face   to see who is   living in   there: a man   or a woman   ? ?

  I Name You Anna –   The amaryllis is tipping her brilliant crimson into the desk.  Her curled stamens, once bold-gold   are suffering into their own dusts.  Some has already let go to a halo surround, their ‘come   and get me’ finger tips lingering in impotence. It’s been Christmas since. There are six   remaining blooms & I’ve turned the drying dying ones to face the south-east away from me.    Such blunted hunger, bulbed in her ball of wax.  Dwarfed. I wonder, when she is   finally spent, can I crack that red wax trapping her bulbs & set into her a pending rescue?  Can I   find, over the course of this next three seasons, a savory soil she can expand in, & spread the span   of her bulbed clavicles, her rooted backbones into sybaritic santana’d black, nudging up, coming from nothing     but her own mothere’...