PREPOSITIONS
 
After against among, around.  How I admire
prepositions, small as they are,
mere safety pins, that hook one thing
to another.  They are the paid help
we never talk to, maids in black uniforms
who pass hors d’oeuvres.   Or rather,
they’re the joy that stitches us to them
when we finally venture words. Who can live
without connections?  Because green waits
for sun to wake it from its winter nap, we say
that sunlight lies on the grass.  Even the simplest
jar must be connected—under moonlight, on
counter, jar in water.  Imagine prepositions
in the Valley of Dry Bones
stitching the femur to the heel,
the heel to the foot bone.  And afterwards,
the bones rise up to dance.  Between, beside,
within may yet keep the chins and breasts
from tumbling off Picasso’s women. 
I would make prepositions stars,
like the Dippers and the North Star,
like the star that traveled the navy sky
the night sweet Jesus lay in his cradle,
pulling the kings toward Bethlehem,
with us behind them, trekking
from the rim of history toward Him.
 
                          --Originally published in Christian Century
                                                        and Books and Culture
 
 
 

SPIRITS
 
March rocks us in its hammock
of purple sky.  Snow has retreated. 
Thunder has not yet cleared its throat
to find a voice.  Silence scours
the tin kettle of earth.

Here at my desk, I think of my friend
who has vanished from the earth.     
All morning I have been reaching for her
with this noun, that verb, but even the most delicate
sentence blunders against her stone absence
and shatters.  Say these words.  What are they,
but vapors?  If I could eat one more meal with her--
slicing a peach, a piece of bread, a little cheese,
I would ask her, without embarrassment, 
where she has gone and what she’s learned.

Driving at night, you cannot hear
the swell of traffic traveling
in the other direction,
 but you can see headlights
scribbling out a journey.
And you wish them well.

                          --Originally published in Ruah
 

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FOREKNOWLEDGE
 
I think he planned it, sort of, from the start,
whether he knew they’d choose the fruit or not,
he scattered hints around the garden, what to do
in case they got themselves kicked out.  A shirt
of fur around the lamb.  The stream converting
water into syllables. Bamboo pipes. 
The caps of mushrooms round as wheels.
Bluebirds composing tunes.  He knew nothing
they started later would be new.  Except he
didn’t factor in the thorns, how they would smart    
as Adam—leaving--drove one through his foot. 
How clever Romans would invent a crown.
He didn’t figure weeds could break His heart.
                                    
                                                   --Originally published in Image
                                               
 
 
 
I MAKE MY X HERE
 
Driving this morning, a poem came to me,
so simple, so pure Keats himself could not conceive it,
and then, turning onto Lombard Street, I lost it. 
 
My first novel, five years in the writing, leapt
like an antelope, but it was stolen from our back porch.
To preserve it, I have never written another.
 
Things are not as good as they were.  But that’s not the surprise
this mediocre winter Thursday evening
with its ticking radiators and fireplace odors.
 
The miracle is that I can still remember how the sky opened
once or twice, and a thousand feathers rocked down.
I make my X here to mark where it happened.
 
Think of how, in the San Francisco earthquake,
William Keith watched his 2,000 landscapes
flame orange, then die to rubies, then to ashes.
 
The next day he started to repaint them
in praise of what he’d lost.  In praise of going on.

                                      ---Originally published in The Southern Review

HOLDING ACTION

Letters, be the memory of this moment,

Ruth’s 3-legged Golden Lab

sniffing for news beneath the hedge,

grass glittering with rain,

the bird feeder mangled by our car.

Years from now I want to remember

how we walked the splendid earth

and saw it.  When children read this

and smile at its old fashioned vision,

then words, stubborn little boxcars

lugging meaning across the rickety

wood bridge to the future, hold,

hold.  Couple against time, bear

the red geranium, the slender birch—

you, sentences--glitter against

the massive dark of nothing.  Tell

of feet that buffed this doorsill

till it gleams, of cartwheeling

children.  Remember the Rosetta

stone, the hum of Xerox machines,

remember monks copying, how

a prisoner in solitary picked up

a pebble to scribble stories

on the wall.  Letters, I tell you,

even if your paper yellows in the attic,

even if it’s torn and thrown into the sea,

each of you separate from your brothers,

swim through the ocean, row across

the sky, walk through the wasteland,

find a reader.  Stay together.  Hold.  

--Originally Published in The Hudson Review