May I

  Mercy Truth is we’re just as lost today (though the terrain has changed) as we were those nearly twenty years ago trying to find our way to a new baby they’d taken ninety plus miles a   w     a     y intubated  incubated & mildly sedated to discover what the trouble was. And because interiors are not obvious obviously it would be weeks of seeing you thrive then quietly decline, cry like quiet babies quietly dying cry and then draw your blessed  caul about your eyes and somehow die and somehow live on in the beneath of it. And I thought maybe you’re trying on this mantle of skin I made for you the way metal tries on the fire the way   the hand that guides it into the blue coals must be a master’s hand and let the earth do what the earth will do and has done long before we even came into this mix of star and igneous stone. ...

  nighthawk migration Assay – one     See: only man-             made birds                         leave their prints                                                   in the                           sky v  ibra ti on

  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    ...