Untaught, I Knew
A saturated past his nod, that untaught, I’d known sacred slant and tilt, in silence, spoke a red blaze to the green man, unmoving and dark as a forest…
Green Offering
Here is my first offering, love: The first time I flew over the Citadelle (The clouds above it shifting to bare its vast self: Fortress meant to keep the…
Saint Augustine
Saint Augustine preached humility & the need to simply be on the ground. Do you wish to rise? he asked. What would he say of these words then, which,…
Fry’s Spring Filling Station
—Charlottesville, VA I am sitting in a station built in the Depression, an island in a scrap drive sea. Now they’ve converted, serve fire-roasted vegetables, plates of bread.…
On the Mountain
In the beginning was nothing, nothing orthodox, nothing unorthodox. Only the pure point of utterness out of which are all things disposed. Still—from the mountain-top you could see all…
Bears Repeating
What is there— other than the bear hold—held up in cold nights as example, other than the body of bears, waiting in caves— the opposite of caving in. Nakedness…
The Old Masters
for Gloria Emerson We were sitting on the back porch when the news came on the radio: Saddam’s tanks racing across the desert into Kuwait. “That’s it,” she said,…
Is Writing Helpful?
hellish bullshit . . . men love it men stupid as cows, pigs —Ikkyu, tr. Stephen Berg After telling each other some awful stuff, the three of us were…
A Dawn Chorus: A Portfolio of Poems in Celebration of Jennifer Barber’s Twenty-Seven Years of Editing Salamander
A few years ago there suddenly appeared a bird’s nest in the hydrangea outside my front door. A little miracle, assembled almost overnight, it had speckled blue eggs within.…
Portent with Moonset & Blackbirds
For a long time I wanted to drink a cup of winter, to become tipsy on early dark & longer starshine. The thinning light my favorite ether. These days…
The Nightingale Floor
We could use some new memories to replace permanent shadows left by people when that next morning the sun rose in Japan as if nothing untoward was happening down…