May I

  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

  at andrew's-- chadd's ford, pa Eighteen Squares of Light   Pentimento  n.   the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over   It’s suddenly a memory now, made possible because of the windows behind me, that a car has gone through its own mirror, emerging a fraction of a second later, the way every reflection figures in the light of redundancy and glass. Imagine this: the second square in from the left of the sash, second row up, seated   and solid between the unmachined muntin coped by hand in around 1810, the glass has seen and been seen through for these last two hundred and more years: bird and person and bear and doe and fox and boys and girls going off and coming home from all those wars and houses that rise and that fall down into the open cellars   of themselves, soothing the sore throats of the neighborhood where old windows and nails and broken frames and

  Paper Name   Anything is a story we tell ourselves about silence.                         Tommy Orange                         Wandering Stars   If our names are written down before we are born for sure I mis-                    heard or mis- understood and I loosed the unlawful one on you.  I put  my lips to your lips and whisp-                                     erd, and you, being so  in your skin mute and new couldn't speak otherwise.  And so you flew  through   almost two decades with the mistaken  name in my sinew, and it beat its three-piece meter in cadenced bass breaths: IN                                     OUT                                     IN in blood & air to the tubes to my lungs and muscles.  Later,  out of wind from my climb (all mothers are out of breath from their climbs) I can see you standing                                                                                                      f