May I

  On Naming   Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground, Each verse returning like the plough turned round.                                       Seamus Heaney                                     Glanmore Sonnets, II   Is it true we name things out of our longing for them the breath of their enunciation in our ear when we lift the syllables from our tongue to our lips? Do we wet those lips before we speak or after?   Is it a dish we’ve come to savor but all aroma no flesh or fat or broth?   There’s salt on the air.   The brining kind.   The kind splayed and blo...

  Orchid   We were walking talking about how erotic certain flora were especially tropical fruits & so who wouldn’t see a mango as a woman’s breast and that stem end her areola her rough used-up nipple?   To me   that’s an intelligent design.   To make a people crave the flaying & impetus of their own lips into the electric flesh & come away rashed ravished & having ravished.   Take this lady slipper I say: look & see her rising up, hemlock/oak   sprill & leaf skirt quieting all this time she spends in her cellar-dark conjuring sisters’ talk with urges with dormancy with aching complacency until the convocation stage is placed & made to wait until all the guest tickets checked are ushered   to their rained-on seats.   It’s as if so much waiting is so much life going by not being seen I mean heaps and heaps of life passed over and so what’s a fruit to do?   Or an or...

At the Olson House Cushing, Maine   Wherefore   To taste as if something tasted for the first time what we will have become then.                                     Jane Hirshfield                                     I Would Like     Where does it go after gathering after all that lather has evaporated?   Imagine up- stream the stallion-black havoc is that fast & has  insisted his dawn call in the slip of wind listen it is  this ripple beginning humbly nearly thoughtless or not thoughtless but still without cause just because   not aimless but without aim it simply is i...

  Infertility   And when at last the leap comes, it is most often also from the side, the rear, an overhead perch; some word-blind woven of brush or shadow or fire.                                       Jane Hirshfield                                     Poetry and the Mind of Indirection   How long, wanting, to root?  Does turning in or turning away?  Or tuning for for that matter. Does sideways?  Does sight but not sight only and scent does scent then its becoming somehow tongue?  A mouth and then a lid for the eye.  Then the other eye. A summoning of touch?  Y...

  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?

  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...

  toward meeting shaker village canterbury, nh Ensoulment   Slice of ice or             like a pie’s pastry                         dough lining the glass                                     plate.   Layer,                                                 layer the folding,                    ...

  How   the only way to see the wind is to witness what objects to it—what it can or cannot say. Though   isn’t this all in the eye of the observer: it’s yes, it’s no, it’s some degree of maybe.  Watch   the shredded ends  of each prayer flag be lifted be sifted be skittered to the plane edge of places to the rising   foundation                         of places to be either struck there by other debris rising and falling in this wind               leaf sideways pasted             sheet flip knitting   always makes me think it’s a creature being chased.  mouse.  mole.  ground squirrel.  something bound to be   small.   ...

  Misericordia    Gates of Mercy, stop breaking down.                                       Charles Wright                                     ARS POETICA III   The visible, vulnerable—a season & a season & halfway into a season.   Of making leaves.   Of making.   Leaves.   When the rain is finished falling, & the wind   that catches all that has been falling in it and has been moved on, when the field seems still as it's ever been   from this distance.   The small copse of white pine.   & a  ways off: the becoming bare sugar...

  ginkgo After Han Kang’s We Do Not Part     When do you think they turned to stone? The moment they looked back?   Or do you think it took a little more time?                         Han Kang                         We Do Not Part for Katie L.   They’ve gone to chalk again, the rocks. The color I mean.   All summer they were dun dust & mud, unearthed as they were   from their slumber.   A broke open exhumation.   Cold dark, I think I see, I want to see a spark come up when it hits another – I   hurl them the way I was taught to hurl medicine balls, from the gut to the gut.   The way it is caught, the way   it takes, because of the weight, the breath that’s...

  West Quoddy Head Lubec, Maine Syllables Are Sometimes Compline, Sometimes Lauds   The longed-for is tiny, and tenuous as a syllable.                                                                                        Charles Wright             On Heaven Considered as What Will Cover Us and Stony Comfort   It’s the one beat, or one raised finger depending – how do you do it?   determine the number of vowel (two) sounds – see I need to watch my hand want to touch the formul...

Jochebed Holding Moses MFA Boston   Zoetrope  Relics, it seems, of the thing are always stronger than the thing itself.  Palimpsest and pentimento, for instance, saint’s bones Or saint’s blood Transcendent architecture of what was possible, say, once upon a time.                                       Charles Wright                                     Relics   Not recovery so much as uncovering all those post-it notes you drew on – whole packs - making your move.   A small dot you’d follow across the square slip of it, slip after slip, so that once done, once set in motion with the thumb, ...