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In stores, my father would reach into his pocket with a big red
hand, offer to pay for his purchases with a fist full of beans,
explaining the economics of abundance: one seed makes one hundred.
I remember the confusion of the cashiers, our mortification.

In the old house he had a bean room snarled with vines, dried beans
in their pods, beans for the apocalypse, beans for the Great Tribulation,
beans for feasting and planting and surviving, beans for life and death.
Grow corn and beans, he said. Put no trust in mammon. Hope in resurrection.

I know what you’ve heard:
Build on rock, so when rain
pours down, you will not fall.

I’m a prickly enigma.
I build my tin-green home
on this sand because we are friends.

Believe it or not,
my foundation is stable.
My rhizomes cement my footer

and multiply my kind all down the line.

My architecture’s ingenious:
my reedy, inrolled leaves store water
and catch the great lake’s wind.

I am a wonder,
and welcoming, sharing the wealth
atop this dune, inviting other colonies

Dominican Republic

The yellow-crowned night heron
Plucks the land crab
Inching from its burrow,

Cracks its red shell
To pick with whetted beak
The shredded innards.

The heron’s plumed skull
Shaded gray and black
Seems rendered by Caravaggio.

How holy to be eaten by beauty,
Or to scuttle
Under a thistle to pinch

The green and blue
Iridescent beetle
And allow beauty to inhabit you.

The strange notion of rûaḥ in the Hebrew Scriptures shatters
taxonomies, leaving us to ask mistakenly, “Is rûaḥ wind? Breath?
Spirit? Or spirit?” In particular, rûaḥ causes tidy dichotomies to
splinter, neat categories to fragment.
                —Jack Levison, A Boundless God

The gray generals topple
while the confederate dead clap their bones.

Send them to the red clay smithies,
beat them into pruning hooks
or cart them to a monument mortuary,

but spare the blameless horses.

Traveller, Little Sorrel, Highfly, Blackjack—
cut the masters off their backs.
Lead them to a parkland
and give them freedom names.

Let the southern children climb atop them
and the northern children play
between their mighty hooves.

The Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

. . . my soul cries for You, O God (Ps. 42:2)

yearning
for streams of water
in the desert
of the Word
I stalk
the voice
where once
all was
but the Word
till it became flesh
and nary a Name
to be found