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to the making
of books
no end

vanity of vanities
in viral times
poems
prayers
sermons
meditations
hosts
of pieties

vanity of vanities
is this
the worship
I choose
go feed
go clothe
and be
mercifully still

All I can write these days
is busy, teeming, too late,
a jar of flour moths
opened in a grain world

or fat maggots
in the disemboweled
squirrel my dog loves.
Lord, give me open hours,

a to-do list in ashes.
Let me carve the heart
of the week and eat it
slowly. Let me sleep in.

Give me a snarl of entrails
and time to weigh them,
to double-check.
Leave the knife

on the table: show me
what to do.

The early palaver of nestling crows
Outside my window in the white pine tree
Calls back a childhood in which such ruckus
Seemed prelude to possibility.

But I need to resist any rosy nostalgia:
I had my small troubles. I scarcely believed
The world would be nothing but pleasure and promise.
Even young, I wasn’t entirely naïve.

Still I woke eager for my gang of pals,
For games we devised by improvisation,
And of course the vigor of our own palaver,
Which was graced by savvy. Or so we imagined.

You, who were not in the candleflame, not
in the Mass this morning, season after season
why do you keep silence? Come. Roll in on breakers
like bright reeking seaweed or drop like a seagull
through a crack in the low stratus. Come any way at all.  
I will be your prey.

This year I find the river slowed,
The trout gone missing, insects too,
The yellow lily, broken-stemmed,
No wild rose or river otter, no
Migrant warblers passing through.

Impermanence, I tell myself,
Though given how I love to fish,
Upset again that nothing lasts,
But bit by bit I settle in for, after
All, I can still cast.

Waist-deep, cold water, rod in hand,
Fly landing gently, mending, drifting,
Expecting nothing, needing nothing,
Rod raised to begin again, line lifting,
Graceful, fine as breath,

for W. H. Auden

     Creator Spirit, Come I bellow as Herr Beer
     picks up our slim offerings
                             “Whitsunday in Kirchstetten”

Some days, when my brother’s death
weighs heavily, I imagine his midnight
visit to my mother, appearing right
in the hallway door beside her bed
all smiles, arms outstretched as in: I’m fine.
She notices he’s wearing the brown jacket
she’d dry-clean each winter so he could pack
lightly on his trip home. Each time

For weeks afterward, photos zing at you, children
weeping in another language, peering into doorways
to find their parents, children gnawing on gristle,
who scrunch up, crouch down, hoping to escape the cages.
A toddler grips her mother’s red skirt just before guards
wrench her hand and split the two apart. The polite voice
of a lost kindergartner repeats the cell number of her auntie
over and over, what she has practiced for months
in a language strange to her: you will want to call her

—a mystery or secret doctrine, Strong’s Concordance

She—dark eyebrows, inky eyes,
raven hair, olive skin—bakes as her family
works in the fields daydreaming

about that bearded man
under their ketubah . . . so handsome!                   
but exiling such thoughts she
reaches for flatbread toasting in a pan