though this winter may never end,
the snow with its patches of stiff, brown grass
7 starlings at the feeder they are just
passing through like you, always
3 exits away from the place
where your heart will stop & stay—
you think maybe under
the ground the sound of ash, the heft the way
your father left & his before all that unfinished
business you’re determined not to have.
I cobble—an editor at deadline—
Psalm 140 to Sonnet 140.
God, hear the voice of my supplications
Lest sorrow lend me words. And words express,
gurgle, flow with bubbles, like deep-cut wounds.
Lest all my words are lamentations, old
parchment ink uplifted in dark scroll script.
Lest I sleep-speak the sorrow words easy
to utter, waiting to choke and smother.
I’d like to know another language, with
words that won’t disappoint the sentences.
Then, I’d crack—but wouldn’t break—a book’s spine
Eight centuries have cut it down to size,
So now only a third of it still lies
Archaically, in its own time, yet here
Where all religious uses disappear—
Except to unbelievers, who have found,
A semblance of something in this ground
When seeing arches ending in the air
Which say while this is lost, it is still there.
What does justice look like?
He asked, and I said, that’s easy.
A bronze statue of a woman
In robes, blindfolded,
Holding up scales. Precisely,
He said, you can almost hear
The correct little clicks of those
Weights in the balance. Now,
He said, what does mercy look like?
That one stumped me.
I recognized you when you spoke my name
in dawn’s light patterned within window frames.
You brightened every pine bough in high summer,
and arrived again in moments—as if you were ever away—
returning with a fierceness that stung my jaw
when I opened my mouth to the sea and breathed.
And you spoke with a force that wills everything,
sweeping stiff clothes white, alive to living.
Your bright wind flickered as new branches grew.
Even when I am blind—darkness is not dark to you.
Translated from Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Images, book 1, part 1
Their mouths are weary yet again.
Their endless spirits only gleam.
And yet a longing (as for sin)
Stirs something in them as they dream.
Alike, those near-identicals,
They grace God’s garden silently.
How many, many intervals
In His great might and melody.
Late spring it sidles from the spermy loam
lost for a spate among the dripping tares—
wild flowers scroll strangled in dross and roam—
sprouting bristly heads of purple hairs
clear to the warped planks spanning Linville Creek.
Choirs of milk thistle congregate the swales.
They’ve come from Vilas to raise a church: The meek . . .
shall inherit the earth. Come the solstice,
Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of
the least of these, you did for me.
—Matt. 25:40–45
These days, though I stuff her manger
with the softest thistles, fill her trough
with dawn-clear water, it’s not enough
to coax her from her quiet. Tears, anger—
both bring forth the same mild stare.