May I

  3 March 2026   “Where do they keep the dark?”                                     Christian Wiman                                     A Light Store in the Bowery   Behind me the moon is eclipsing.   Her light is being taken slice by slice   until she will be entirely behind a shadow that seems more solid than she is, & more   permanent for its impermanence. From time to time I imagine I   am a shadow too, I glide room to room window to window   while she declines, her falling is discrete behid (is that even a word?) between   cedar limbs, Mar...

  Ash Wednesday   You don’t climb out of poverty so much as carry it with you.                                                 Christian Wiman                                     The Parable of Perfect Silence   Remember the line of faithful the line of un faithful & who an really say don’t we go in for the scrape of it on our faces, & how the paste it has been rendered   into by the heat & press against the ablution cup, the thumb up on the constant flow of skin the mingle of it all & this is just the beginning isn’t it, a ...

  Possibly   There is a dreamer all good conductors   know to look for when the last stop is made                           Christian Wiman                         All Good Conductors   Possibly it’s not the body we look back on one last time just one last time after all that was ever in it which is to say breath which is to say dreaming which is to say the tongue lifted to the roof of the mouth to make a sound to swallow that sound the way wind is swallowed how it pushes itself through     mountains & the cliffs of mountains & the floors of mountains out on toward the shore the salt of the water there and the flie and the hides of all   the congregants stoopin...

  Taking Pictures   Maybe that’s why we want photos most of all, the caught pause, the stationed   place where no matter where we are or how we age beyond   it all we will have that moment & some- how our brain will deliver us to   the terminal & we will look through panes of glass at everything that is   passing & then at the one thing that is held: from this perspective the sun   coming down like it does & framed precisely in the window, the burst star   of it safe to see & see & see & see & it can make no claim to pull us into   blindness – remember Galileo & all his lenses & the gradual way his world   shut like a blind coming down in his room at eventide?   Here we can walk   for decades & look back at that sunset and say: I remember that.   I remember that,   don’t you?

  Because   Because nobody tells us how to do it or can to loose the still sticky sinew we pinch into the print of our fingers its grip insisting a rhythmic kinship with the distant umbilical cut from us some seventy plus forevers ago its dust                      it’s dust as rises up the thermal pull of her departure and by some intimacy of design is aligned to the aquatic quality of her breath to manifest there until renovated to snow that as we walk toward our future alone of her     it falls on us our clavicle our exposed throat so subtle a touch as to make us part our lips so we can how long have we held it         breathe again

  held   “An Academy of silences” Diane Seuss said   and I was just before thinking about how so many relationships are carried on as though someone has just stepped on the detonation pin, & the long aftershock pause has stopped it all: the victims, intimates, and random passersby.   The fragility of its nearly imperceptible sound, or, for those who didn’t hear it, the stock-still posture, the absolute awe of the flesh yet cleaved to its tendon & bone not yet cleaved from its tendon and bone.   Toe pin.   The lift of the heel, the perceptive listener, like a piano tuner at rush hour who can sift through so many so many notes on those slack wires . . . her hand goes up just as her face is drained & everything is quiet.   This my friends is the true test of strength, the caution of the tipped   bomb, the unlifted weight, the people feeling their face their ribs their crotches to t...