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Where ice-melt ran yesterday,
grass bends flat. Violet leaves
like green hearts spring up again,
relieved of pressure.

Out of soft earth, a blossom
comes forward. Moss crawls tree trunks,
new emerald skin.

I used to think of you as an arrow
of fire, or as a sharp wind
full of sand. Flinching,
I braced to meet you.

Now, as stems spring up again
and ground gives way underfoot,
I hold you in my hand where you tremble
like the round, brown body of a dove.

The hawk grips electric wire and waits,
his brown-feathered head as smooth as if
he’d slicked it back this morning with a comb,
the way his keen eyes part the bent weeds
in the run-off ditch beside the road.

He perches on the line, against the stretched spring
blue, like a metaphor ineffable and wide.
Is he the talon lurking from above that finally
rends us? Or the power that lives beside us, laboring
to lift us with unfolding wings?

(from John 11:17–44)

Dead, poor thing: we dreamed of him,
those few days, crying, threshing,
in his stone room—no stories, no songs, his sisters

gone away. —Raised, he capers again
along the goat-tracks, yoohoos from the hills:
but the boys have stopped their tormenting—no fun to it,

him not minding. He lies at night, quiet,
eyes gleaming in the starlight. —Jolt of carcass, lurch
of clotty stenchy blood: to God’s dear fool,

Will prevent infection, my mother advised.
But when I stepped on nails, wailing from concrete,
she followed those spoonfuls with a tiny jar,
dripping eucalyptus beads for further protection.

Like Saturdays, when my pastor’s husband bakes
Communion loaves in midnight’s sacristy,
humming hymns and molding mysteries, yet
I pray extra blessings the next day as my lips

absurdity and
death and
insanity, and

personal immortality

My Son so
performed His

miraculous acts

with no
safety net, neither
any thing up His
sleeve, nor even a
fire curtain

any where in sight

preferring to walk
a tight taut rope,

a Crimson Clown
as acrobat, not
an acrophobe
He trod

the thin wire of
Faith, like

walking on water

I wake up to moon and stars still gleaming
in the predawn sky, and think, who cares
about someone else’s inscrutable dream?
I’ll insist, like everybody,
Mine is different. Listen.

A great white bird—a swan, perhaps, 
or egret—hard to tell, so blinding
bright its splendid plumage—stood
in our kitchen citing Scripture.
To think of its words now takes me

—Mark 3:5 ESV

Fifty-nine translations in English.
Four recuse Jesus from anger,
selecting indignation, furious,
ka’as, wrath instead. Anything

to keep Jesus from anger.
These gospels pierce us until,
like making eye contact
with panhandlers, we turn away.

And yet fifty-five times, the Son of God,
the Man of Sorrows, the One acquainted
with grief, looks into everyone present.

Rain, early March rain
Heaving against the windows;
March storms in again,

All bluster, as though
Intending to remind me
Of something I know:

As spring will appear
Behind this sorry weather,
So grief, this past year,

Has stayed coy, low-key
But now seems poised to flower,
Be what it should be—

Or at least regret
For things we couldn’t settle,
Forgive, or forget.