May I

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

  Aubade for You on this Day This  September First Day   It is better to say “I am suffering,” Writes Simone Weil, “than to say ‘This landscape is ugly.’”                                     Christian Wiman                                     Zero at the Bone:                                                 Fifty Entries                                                 Against Despair     Sometimes without you the sky is wide it is wide it is so wide it casts no shadow no shadow can be cast it cannot be cast it is without cloud it is cloudless it is shifting it is wind without wind without enough wind to make it white or grey or black it is dustless nothing has risen nothing has and without what cannot spur the dust to rise there is no dust and dustless it is without color the sky is without color it is without a drop of water a drop of water that cannot freeze that cannot become ice that cannot become snow or rain that cannot fall or be thrust out some

  Dear Mae And the sun too docks Beyond the water, she Recedes, sometimes neatly, Sometimes kaleidoscopically, & Always, have faith, Briefly. 

  If I Were Writing to You Today, I’d Say:   To explain grace requires/a curious hand.                                     Marianne Moore                                     The Pangolin   Remember:   your yesterday             clothes damp from being             on you from your sitting             in hours             of drizzle of let up of deluge of worn then shorn             and flung to sit             in the corner             of the bathroom &             crumpled: how             they resemble all the rest             of your clothes how             they used             to look before being washed then             before being dried (remember                                     the clothesline                                                                         by the sea and                                     in Maine                                     how your favorite                                     turtle came back

  The Sentry As Witness   three days the moon will be full   again and in the night   while we sleep while we turn   when we can’t sleep an owl will ride   the never stopping thermal across   the moon’s face and be just   a shape – just a shadow   briefly obliterating   the light that’s cast the path   of a stray rabbit   stunned stiff in being   seen.  it makes me want to say this entirely out of context: not all marriages not all childbirths   not all wild night embraces are meant   to be anything else but or beyond the brief   mouth on mouth, claw penetrating skin,    the situation peeled back   in the bright path breaching   the white under- belly now draped   in the patient maple is an opportunistic   claw tipped now in the vicious    vermilion, filtered and tipped with    mosaic tufts of feather,   of fur, and what's not stuck floats up to view

  John 1:14   All your life you’ve been asleep, all us sleeping and now the great waking begins.                                                 John Lynch                                                 Prophet Song   Word made flesh it’s said.  What if:   THE word made flesh or what if the WORD made flesh or what if the word MADE flesh or what if the word made FLESH or what if   you could see I could do this all night and day take that phrase and make it say some thing different every time make it mean or make it mean make it or make it make it mean it or make it mean take it just simply  take it.  yes?                            yes.   utterly. every single time.   Until we all suffer the rusted adjustment.  Until we step up to the threshold and take on the asking:   are we along the way the breather or are we along the way the breathed upon?   &   I want to say it was a word that made you but I can’t say