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NOW,

after a first moment in eternity
I turn around. I’m back in my backyard,
the weeping willow dead, the bottle brush,
the southern flowers I planted, novelties
to me, the northerner, dead, dead, all dead.

And on the branches of the dead magnolia
the dead birds perch, swallow and nightingale,
their dead eyes holding reflections of the flowers,
genus and species, dead, sere, leaves cracked, dead
all crawling things, all flying, speechless, dead,

Those Magi

—hijacked into foil-gilded greeting cards,
sung into libretti over organ chords. Sultans
or astrologers?  They trekked into the unknown
on a hunch, launched out from some far land
of distress or empty comforts looking for a shred
of truth, or inspiration, through an aperture
of prophecy. Did they seek liberation, or simply
a moment to see into the ultimate? No matter
they tumbled into a tyrant’s path, beneath a comet’s
tail, stumbled into more misery: an outcast couple
and infant sheltered in a cattle-scented shed. Yet

Epiphany

After the Birth,
The season of light—
Out of the darkness,
The moonflower opens,
Luminous, petals
Unfurling in the night,
As the star beckons,
Guiding us across
The lunar landscape
To the stable lit
By new life, a candle
Cradled, light bearing
Light.

 

Practice

Whether meditation or prayer,
I call what I do each day practice
because I know I’ll always be a novice
seated at the piano, playing
my scales, doing whatever it takes
to make music out of touch and air.

Sun slants through leaded glass
as it has year after year
across the seasons in this house,
but there is nothing typical about
October light or this Christmas cactus
with tight pink buds about to bloom.

Wolferl in Rome, 1770

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals . . .
                     —W. H. Auden

Certainly you want it, but that’s the point:
you love it, it has mastered you. And you’re here
in this chapel to submit, adoring, passionate.

You can’t help it if the notes seep into your brain,
soak your memory without asking, make a map
of themselves, if the music just imprints itself

A window

A window is not as open as it seems
keeping out cold
               the pine needles’ freshness
               the cardinal’s call

A starling dives straight for it
veering off
               last second
when its gold surface gleams