As part of your opening welcome over the pulpit, you announced to us that filming and photography were not allowed in the chapel. We had just gathered there in front of my father’s closed casket…
“Stop gawking at that guy,” Mother said, as I stood staring at a man while shopping in a five and dime store in Idaho Falls. I had never seen a black person before. I stood…
Mnemosyne She was still puzzled that the stars were not the same ones she knew. She cor rects. That she used to know. Where was Orion, its belt and sword glowing bright with mythic power…
When you’re young you think “widow” is a misprint for “window.”
Then the tarp of age gets pulled over you and the words drift apart.
There is a cleanness to good marriage that is like the Renaissance.
It is a force of beauty that tramples mere love. When the blood rushes
After the staredown, saliva gathering in their mouths,
cotton swelling in his, Daniel invited the lions
out for drinks and a late supper.
The sky has fasted in the desert
forty thousand years.
Now it’s caught a glimpse
of barley fields and orange groves:
the table the world sets for winter.
Among the death of foliage
in skeleton trees
he appears, moonlight gracing
his rack—that upturned,
In the pasture behind the barn
where workhorse colts frolic all summer long,
the creek, once the broth of stones, freezes over,
greens and blues of creek bed and cottonwood
muted in meandering.
When Jesus took the church to bed, rocks rent,
earth groaned, sky split, spilt watered wine.
Trees shivered to their hearts to know the carpenter
laid in the bed he’d made, stone of his stone.
A star exploded, scattering its life
So earth could gather from the dust and churn
A healthy wheel of seasons. Life will burn
And feed the soil so seeds will germinate.