May I

  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’...

  Mercy Truth is we’re just as lost today (though the terrain has changed) as we were those nearly twenty years ago trying to find our way to a new baby they’d taken ninety plus miles a   w     a     y intubated  incubated & mildly sedated to discover what the trouble was. And because interiors are not obvious obviously it would be weeks of seeing you thrive then quietly decline, cry like quiet babies quietly dying cry and then draw your blessed  caul about your eyes and somehow die and somehow live on in the beneath of it. And I thought maybe you’re trying on this mantle of skin I made for you the way metal tries on the fire the way   the hand that guides it into the blue coals must be a master’s hand and let the earth do what the earth will do and has done long before we even came into this mix of star and igneous stone. ...

  nighthawk migration Assay – one     See: only man-             made birds                         leave their prints                                                   in the                           sky v  ibra ti on

  Young Mother in the Grotto Auguste Rodin 1885-1891 When I Look Back You Are   Gone     It’s hard to describe extreme pain, and the pain of cancer has an otherworldly intimacy that makes it almost impervious to words. It feels like existence itself is eating you.                         Christian Wiman                         Zero at the Bone                                     Fifty Entries Against                         ...

  What does a mirror see When it sees into another Mirror?