May I

  nesting wrens     Wrens, twa &   twain             their   twist—ellipsis in mid-air             insist & dip & instantly                         lift the ground to sky                                     a notation’s rise while I forever dressed in gravity             fight my ever desiring                         eye—not envy—no—      ...

  Dear May,   Today already a great clear sky & cloudless wide wide beside the mountain.   Yesterday I was remembering that William Carlos Williams poem, his So Much Depends, you know the one,   because I saw those white chickens, four of them, pecking in the grass, their red combs flapping, happy in their cracking open the thaw of sod & all there waiting like daughters congregating:   small wriggling things on pause all winter long. Still in shock probably, they won’t recognize their transformation from mossy bed to squeeze box belly.   The birds were not beside a red wheel   barrow.   & if there was a bucket I didn’t see it though it had rained & there was a glaze if it some place near.   They were beside the purple house – remember the one? An almost   flock of them, all business like in their tight white maxi dresses, oblivious & content & briefly free,  befor...

  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?