May I

  Young Mother in the Grotto Auguste Rodin 1885-1891 When I Look Back You Are   Gone     It’s hard to describe extreme pain, and the pain of cancer has an otherworldly intimacy that makes it almost impervious to words. It feels like existence itself is eating you.                         Christian Wiman                         Zero at the Bone                                     Fifty Entries Against                         ...

  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           ...

  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    ...

  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    verm...

  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 so...