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flicker

with gratitude to Adam S. Miller and Ryan W. Quinn in the beginning, Godgave grace awayfast and free to all this is what we call creationwhich was actually continuationand still continues every day, every hour,…

Noted in the Dark

Some nights here there’ve been singings      the children out into twilight . . . their countings,their hidings, their      ally ally oxen frees.And sometimes the crickets were not sounding bereft      but offered impressions you needed to hear. Now in…

These Are the Hours

when birds disappear taking strips of light      folded in feathersnight insects ready themselves      for meals from leaves of rose and raspberrythe hollow by the lane      pools with evening like waterno moonrise cool radiance      but night…

Vantage: Hoback Rim to Wind River

Closed to drift most of the year,trails descend through short lives of wildflowersbright in colonies, August air verging on frost,its thin metallic edge:snow squalls visible aheadwhere a continent divides.Life stays steep. Nothing in the view…

The Days Between—After Leaving Our YoungestAt College

It’s turning fall in this long alley of young trees,poplar leaves still and golding in deep shade.You see no one and hear not even birds. But the pale trunks together seem to humlike choir rows,…

Lithium Shuffle

Down the streettrusties from the state hospitalfollowing the horizon of their noon shadows,their feet scooping up the sidewalk,the fastest as slow as the slowest.The sun is on them and pitiless.If we, shaded neighborson the other…

heavy seeds

. . . they buried the weapons of war, for peace. Alma 24:19 bury seeds these      with covenant gritshrill songs on our lips      as we circle the pit clank seeds clanging      as we cry-file bybeg,…

Homemade Medicine

Grandpa filled gelcaps with his own mixof dried herbs. Before clean food,before expensive organics, beforewellness became photogenic,he was a health nut. I asked himwhy did he grind dried leavesthe color of new hay,why did he…

Heart Sutra (In the guest bedroom at dawn, after the pandemic)

1Today we scorn Russians,But we were invaders, too.Our lifestyle at stake in Iraq.Searching but not finding.Blood and bones and dirt.Infection and tears.Fighting to prove . . . what?Truth? America? God on our side? Twenty years ago, I heard…

No Man Can Serve Two Masters

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. But my diagnosis says otherwise.  Depression oozes under my door:  the destroying angel visits:until I can’t get out of bed.  One week later I’m waving bloody hyssop  like glow sticks at a ravenudging sushi…

All Content

flicker

with gratitude to Adam S. Miller and Ryan W. Quinn in the beginning, Godgave grace awayfast and free to all this is what we call creationwhich was actually continuationand still continues every day, every hour,…

Noted in the Dark

Some nights here there’ve been singings      the children out into twilight . . . their countings,their hidings, their      ally ally oxen frees.And sometimes the crickets were not sounding bereft      but offered impressions you needed to hear. Now in…

These Are the Hours

when birds disappear taking strips of light      folded in feathersnight insects ready themselves      for meals from leaves of rose and raspberrythe hollow by the lane      pools with evening like waterno moonrise cool radiance      but night…

Vantage: Hoback Rim to Wind River

Closed to drift most of the year,trails descend through short lives of wildflowersbright in colonies, August air verging on frost,its thin metallic edge:snow squalls visible aheadwhere a continent divides.Life stays steep. Nothing in the view…

The Days Between—After Leaving Our YoungestAt College

It’s turning fall in this long alley of young trees,poplar leaves still and golding in deep shade.You see no one and hear not even birds. But the pale trunks together seem to humlike choir rows,…

Lithium Shuffle

Down the streettrusties from the state hospitalfollowing the horizon of their noon shadows,their feet scooping up the sidewalk,the fastest as slow as the slowest.The sun is on them and pitiless.If we, shaded neighborson the other…

heavy seeds

. . . they buried the weapons of war, for peace. Alma 24:19 bury seeds these      with covenant gritshrill songs on our lips      as we circle the pit clank seeds clanging      as we cry-file bybeg,…

Homemade Medicine

Grandpa filled gelcaps with his own mixof dried herbs. Before clean food,before expensive organics, beforewellness became photogenic,he was a health nut. I asked himwhy did he grind dried leavesthe color of new hay,why did he…

Heart Sutra (In the guest bedroom at dawn, after the pandemic)

1Today we scorn Russians,But we were invaders, too.Our lifestyle at stake in Iraq.Searching but not finding.Blood and bones and dirt.Infection and tears.Fighting to prove . . . what?Truth? America? God on our side? Twenty years ago, I heard…

No Man Can Serve Two Masters

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. But my diagnosis says otherwise.  Depression oozes under my door:  the destroying angel visits:until I can’t get out of bed.  One week later I’m waving bloody hyssop  like glow sticks at a ravenudging sushi…

Throwing Up in the DC Temple

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Maybe it was envy  that churned inside meas I looked around the room. Wonderingwhat healthy Mormons felt  instead of fear.   My body forced  everyone  to consider  what it meant to be sick in…

Passion

“And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?”—1 Nephi 11:16 A body so light, it floatedacross wind-whipped wavesand did not sink. So full of life,it survived empty forty days,no wheat for forty…

Fierce Passage

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Today while researching ancestors, sifting through nested petalsof records for names that belong to me, peoplewho’ve left their bloody signatures in my genes, I found Melissa, some sixth…

A Good Sick Girl Never Gives Up

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. A good sick girl would never give up.She pushes on in search of a cure,working as if all depended on her.“Not knowing beforehand” what she should do,she moves…

Hippocrates

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. The doctor calls her sweetheart when she criesat hearing there is nothing he can find.He pats her back but will not meet her eyes. He doesn’t really mean…

Migraine Suite

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Prelude Something is not right.      A haunting quaver to the world. Your mind  feels viscous, your body      watery. The lights have dimmed. The sense      of the smell  of ozone. AllemandeA greasy fingerprint on…

Thanksgiving in Kindergarten: Salt Lake City, Utah, 1996

We grew up in a city named for water we could not drink.Our ancestors walked for miles to finda home that would not burn so easily,then stumbled on salt, which meant preservation. In 1996 we…

Mormon Tea

I.They leftDenmark’s ripening wheat fields,crossed moss-covered pathsof England and Wales, forsookthe saturated airof Tennessee to build homeson ground glazed in the open-air kilnof the western sun.Called by God,they did not think to askfirst peoples for…

Collect for a Family Friend Killed in a Sabbath Morning House Fire

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. O, preening angels, voyeursof bright and burning things, of underbuilding flare-ups andflaming caved-in tinder, whose breathing—plumed, infernal,unforgiving—sweltered her last daybreak with unholy invocation—Please, if mercy be,…

Earthen Lavers Tyler Chadwick, Litany with WingsScott Hales, Hemingway in Paradiseand Other Mormon PoemsElizabeth Pinborough, The Brain’s Lectionary:Psalms and Observations

A few years ago, William Logan wrote, “Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience.”[1] We could more accurately call it a major art with many minor audiences grouped, like the poets,…

My Body in the Temple

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. Halfway through the session, I become awareof a full bladder and nothing else.All that is holy is eclipsedby flesh. I pant in claustrophobiabetween the lady who…

Like a Prayer—Phormium tenax

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. How that late sabbath afternoon you sat cross-legged on their lawn, Elder S at your side, the couple just across, their backs to her late summer…

anamnesis: confronting God in the flesh

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. 1. a patient’s accountof medical history,a reiteration of conditionscontracted by mortality,a form of proud flesh’sgranulation over a wound,a raised tissue massdelineating impact to sayhere is pain,…

Osmond Ward Chapel, Now Demolished

Sometimes from the thresholdof these doorswe are greeted by another self,another worldwe wish to worship, incarnationthe tithe we offerfor such a crossing: we, seeking the divine,the divine leaning toward us,fading coal of memory igniting into…

Portrait of Agnes

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. Stern little lady,ancestor in an oval frame,I like the way your shoulders slopeand your fingers dangleover the book and the carpetbag skirt.I like the way your…

Cemetery Walk

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. It was somewhere around here, I think.Where they buried that baby,yeah, the one I told you about.No, not by the pioneer obelisksa wife for each sidefresh…

The Garden I Know

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. In his artistic agony,diamond drops of bloodcovered Christ’s chiseled body,sacred sweat shimmeredin the light of the Passover moon.The Son of God, an altarpiece,in serene pain and…

Third Place: Penitent Magdalene, Donatello

Shock of agingin a wooden sculpture—more than yearsdisplayed here,her gauntand weathered faceportraying time had its way—sunken eyes,broken teeth,parched and haggard lips. The cathedralof her handsforms a gothic archbelow her chinsuggesting prayer,her frail body embracedby heavy…

First Place: His Own Hand

I desire to be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.—Theologica Germanica i. What the Right Hand Is Take my right hand—the index finger crookedfrom a long-forgotten break; the dintwhere…

Second Place: Our Lady of Innumerable Appellatives

Listen to the Out Loud version of the poem here. Enter into Her gates with thanksgivingand into Her courts with praise.—Psalm 100:4 1.Swirl of gold gleaming in our daughters’ eyes.Amen. Whorl of cirrostratus haloingthe moon.…

Saint George, Utah

Listen to the audio version here. Not named for the Saintwho met the princess bythe lake and with her girdleleashed the dragon. Who killed it for the people’s conversion.Whose chapel in Windsorholds a part of…

Bear One Another’s Burdens

Getting there

Paper Route

Podcast version of this piece. Sabbath afternoon in summer sometimes feelslike those February mornings I’d wedge thedamp butt of each newspaper in friend’s saddlepack clouded gray with his indistinguishablefingerprints. Their buckling mouths a smudgedbouquet of…

From the Angels’ Perch at Mount Moriah

Podcast version of this piece. Scene: Thicket for a Slaughter We have seenbets, contests— only the greatones sent tospar with God: father, son,sacrifice. Scene: An Examination Question:the brain, a tangledbramble—the fire and the knife,a fearsomebinding.…

Recreating Abraham’s Star Charts

Podcast version of this piece. I pause on the path, drop my sticks,and bend to read them like runes.Tell the stars, They said. So I do daily— I chart their breathless turning asI gather berries…

Addendum to Jacob Sorensen’s Patriarchal Blessing

Podcast version of this piece. I don’t know, Jake,why Dad asked me to drive you there,but I did hear every word Brother Allen said,and here’s a few he skipped: Our Heavenly Fatheris pleased with your…

Ministry of angles

Podcast version of this piece. You who more than oncespelled angle when meaning angel,are now one—maybe both.A sharp line on white paperdriving hardand fastin another spacewhose numbersI do not know. YetIn the arithmeticof our individual…

Morning Light

Podcast version of this piece. That dark matter that fashioned us, days laterMade light by command, what voice, I wonderCould shake atoms into place and stir invisibleWaves through the air, as something we cannot seeAllows…

Tender Rills

Podcast version of this piece. If Gods are poeming Kolob,if I am poeming God, if we arepoems to each other, A word is more than a destinationthan a path, than a map. A word is…

Prism

Podcast version of this piece. They had agreedthat if she were seenthe boy wouldn’t be believedin seeing them.Nevertheless, she was there,her iridescent spherea coronaover their column of sun,reflecting,refractingthe morning.The flowers turned to her,the green of…

God the Mother Speaks of Salt

Podcast version of this piece. I baptized you before you were born. After, rubbed you clean.I’ll cleanse all your wounds in season. You’ve forgottenhow to savor my holy. If you seek,you’ll find these veins run…

God the Mother Speaks of Xenia

Podcast version of this piece. I AM the children sleeping under mylar in a Texas warehouse.I AM the fathers lifting toddlers to their shoulders on our journeyto safety and rest. I’m safety and rest. But…

Benediction

Podcast version of this piece. Here’s the truth: My faith remainstepid. Lukewarm as summer rain. Spew-worthy. A compass in fragments, I saved pieces: base plate, arrow, needle.Reassembly is beyond me. Millennia ago, I stood on…

Book of Life, for Timothy Liu

Podcast version of this piece. If there is a literal bookon a plinth of filigreed gold, and an angelstanding as sentinel at heaven’s needle-eye entrance, who’s not to sayour names appear etchedon its pages, un-erasable.…

God the Mother Speaks of Hearts

Podcast version of this piece. won’t you agree with me the heart’s a glorious organ moon jelly  a ghost heart throbbing in oceanlily bulb  an earth heart humming undergroundbear  a furred heart curled up in cave’s dark I’m…

Mothersong

Podcast version of this piece. Let us amass our wandering kicks, wondering in awe at thesecostumes her womb hath made. O Motherof the sacred hearts, sing your peasant lullabies before our every sleep. Ring like…

creation story

Podcast version of this piece. He makes the light and the primeval oceans and the rapturous Word, but I have the dirt the ground the chthonic underbelly and sustenance of all. I have the jewel-toned…

Big Bang, with Sternutation and Seer Stones

Podcast version of this piece. i. In the beginning, Mother worked yleminto a loose sphere. A swirl of stray particles, stirred by the breeze blown through herstudio window, circled her workbench, tickled her nose. She…

Ascension, after John Donne

Podcast version of this piece. Embrace the first and forever night,Heartening as this Moon journeys from crestingTo full-figured, and in this ecstasy begins to fallEarthward, pulling me down to orchards heavyAnd underground, into mysteries of…

Acoustic

Podcast version of this piece. My devotion never translates to my fingers.There is something lost.The scaly chaff of my heart opens my lungs.I pinch my pic like a quillwhat can I scrawl in the dusk?…

Hymn to a Maple

Podcast version of this piece. Your inverted slant is an acute notewest to east in the shaded sunrisesurrounded as you are by that moatof rocks and weeds, dry as a chalk line. One Goliath’s push…

Salt Lake City, 1957

Podcast version of this piece. Sunday morning in Salt Lake City, whenfaithful Mormons flock to worshipat neighborhood wards, my father’ssecret psychiatric patients slip insidethe back door of 508 East South Temple,for fifty-five-minute appointments.A nurse impersonator,…

Color

Podcast version of this piece. Morning at homelistening to silenceand a solo cello,caressing old books,fog outside,fire inside. Treesin crystal veils,fog-doused sun,Earth’s palette replacedby soot and chalk. No color.Only grays,darker or lighter.No real black.No clean white.…

Book of Mormon Poetry James Goldberg, A Book of Lamentations

A few years ago I was researching poems written about the Book of Mormon. I had read Eliza R. Snow’s “The Lamanite” (adapted from a poem she wrote before becoming a Latter-day Saint titled “The…

Young Gods

Slipping off a Sunday dress—hoping you’ll join me and undress.No more dark slacks and white shirts,corruption of innocence tends to hurt.It’s worship too irreverent for pews,forgive my transgression against a holy muse,but, trust me, crisis…

Casual Violence in Sunday School

John the Baptist was a hairy scorpionwho skittered out from the wildernessand began stinging folksuntil they saw the Holy Ghost. He molted like all prophets do,lived in caves, under rocks,until the predators found him—took his…

The Leper

An armadillo dug up the grassin my parents’ yard last year— the kind that bounce buckshotoff their back and carry leprosy. If only I could do the same:materialize armor, lumber along. I could curl up…

Bi-Bestiary

I suppose only the animals that paired offand shuffled up the rampsurvived the flood. So this Bishop, pointing outthat we would rather flirtthan marry—well, he built an Ark out of the treeslining the church property.He…

Daffodils

Your lips are melting petals,Wilting into my mouth.My tears not clearEnough to revive them. When you learn to fly,Will they forget to dance?Lose their maypole eyelashesAnd languish, lonely, withWings cut. And yet,I pray, make me…

Created in His Image

I.The first lie they told me wasBlonde Jesus. Thick Belinda locks,And blue ocean eyes.He hangs on the cross, whiteLike a tender lamb, orWhite like a lily flower,Or like white snowSmothering brown ground. II.The second lie…

“I Cannot Describe Salt”: Elizabeth Willis, Poets in Exile, and the Church Invisible in the Age of Pandemic

Ever since Socrates banished poetry in Book X of Plato’s Republic with a flippant “if . . . poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her,”[1] Western poets…

Review: Poetry as Ceremony Tacey M. Atsitty, Rain Scald

O Holy People, show me how I am human,how I am soon to sliver. Stay please, for womanor man’s sake. Succor me from a telestial state,where I long to be self-luminous in a slateof granite.…

Candy Dish Sonnet

Already the heart-shaped dish on my end tablelies combed bare: long strips dug out============== a cleaning out============== a scratch in grain, table scraps lain out so comely, meaning to loveor hold cacao or almonds—those striaeof…

Lacing

VII. Sometimes I kneel down to play a gamefrom my childhood. Only then can I feelgrains of gravel, each pebble digs in so real.Sometimes I act as though I am the same,a young girl, rope…

Review: Dayna Patterson, If Mother Braids a Waterfall

Review: Dayna Patterson, Titania in Yellow

Review: Sunni Brown Wilkinson, The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

Review: Michael Lavers, After Earth

Review: Kate Piersanti, Life in Poetry

Review: Jan G. Otterstrom F., Move On

Review: Colin B. Douglas, Into the Sun: Poems Revised, Rearranged, and New

Review: R. A. Christmas, Leaves of Sass

Parousia

She says she was eating or opening a window or just walkingdully along, and always had been, but tonight there might befew angels. These things. Our dogwagging across the foreground, the porchthat still needs fixing…

Matriarchal Blessing

Your hands were on my head first. No formal ceremony. I was an infantand shouting clouds trundled and thundered,atmospheric pressure strangled my stubborn ears refusing airflow.The blue chair in the living room rocked,my cries received…

Grasshoppers in the Jar of the World

The jar is silent because it is full of praise.The grasshoppers are loud because they, too,are full of praise, clicking as they fly. The grasshoppers jump, but the jar is too high.They try to climb,…

Praying on Gravel

Not yet March, already weedsbring me to my kneeswith trowel and bare fingers. Under the loblollythe hellebore are in bloom,a periwinkle or two. The weeds are in the white gravelof the walk. My son has…

Until You Come

Taipei, ’97. I walk past side-streetvendors selling lychee nuts and blackrice cakes, to an acre of bare dirt,concrete pylons lifting a cloverleaf.A grizzled man by a beat-up Buickthrows gobbets of meat from the trunkto a…

James Goldberg and Ardis Parshall, Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic

His Twelve Points of the Scout Law (Grandpa Fesses Up)

Sunni Brown Wilkinson. The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

“To speak to Moses, God / put a stone in his mouth, put on / a sackcloth of verbs (want, need), / cleared his throat. Cried out” (3). Sunni Brown Wilkinson this way begins her collection The…

Karen Anderson’s Excavation of Ghosts Karin Anderson. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

Mark 5:9—“My name is Legion: for we are many”—opens Karin Anderson’s masterwork Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. Anderson lyrically pools her ancestral narrative in sweeping loops, eddying history, religion, and landscape. Ghosts speak elusive,…

Becky, Not God

set the hour for their reunion.She’s under the greencanopy in the closed coffin. She signed away her body,except for her skin,so her hip bones might be recycled into screws to repair broken anklesor wedges to…

The Stars Saw God

I found God huddled in my father’s insanity.There beneath the layersof confusion—as to why none of us saw thespinning ball or the parade outside—I saw his vacant expression shine out likeGod-rays through the clouds.Clarity in…

Daryl Prays, The Snake River, and Insomnia

Daryl Prays How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! Lamentations 4:1 At fourteen, Daryl cut across an empty lotbehind a brick pharmacywhere he had picked up his mom’s pills(linden…

Genesis Chiasmus

In the Big Ending,My son used to sayWhen I read him the Genesis board book.Which was perfect, I thought.Such a start must surely have followedAn ending that was big.What brought that ending on? And whatGave…

Born Again

Because I did not fit a second timein the womb of my mother,I was born of my father instead. He held my arm to haul me from the waterand with the other, squared it to…

Women’s Blessing

Issue of Blood

Explaining God the Mother to My Father

Self Portrait in Which I Fail to Hide My Daddy Issues From Google

Willing the Storm

On Women and Priesthood Power

Mother’s Blessing

Reason Stares

A Found Poem

The “Blackblue Heartguts” of Trees Brooke Larson. Pleasing Tree.

Third Watch

Vernal

Dry Tree

True Religion

The Agreement

The Four Stanzas of the Apocalypse

Advent: Moose in Moonlight

Creek Skating

Bridegroom

Jesus Christ

New & Everlasting

Sweater

The Moldau in a Utah Living Room

The Mormon Peace Gathering

Sunday School

Judas

Devotion

Prodigal Daughter

What Ashmae Taught Me

Circles and Lines

January 21, 2019

Our Lady of the Temple

Prayers for the Altars

Friday Morning Shift

Skin of Garments

My New Temples

Then and Now

Limen

Ritual

Placenta

Dream Psalm

Walking Back to the ‘70s

Talitha koum

On Cherubim and a Flaming Sword by J. Kirk Richards

Review: It’s Lonely at the Top Ryan Shoemaker. Beyond the Lights.

Review: Mother, May We? Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. Edited by Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, and Martin Pulido.

The Older Covenant

The Tree at the Center

One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days

The Pioneer Woman, St. George

Self-Portrait of Mormon Middle Child as Isabella

After the Curtain Falls, Isabella Speaks in Achromatics

Review: “Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows

Raking

the fog

Soft

A Better Country

Poema de Halloween, 2001

Alpha

Sonnet—For Solstice

Agency of all that matters

Choose Your Own Belief: Of Sharks, Art, & God

Forgotten Birds

Domestiku

The Goodness of Created Things

If Joseph Smith Had Been Born in California

As If Nothing Matters

Faith

At Least

Trevor at the Fountain

Grand Canyon, North Rim

Ajalon Moon

The Holy Ghost in Polyhymnia’s Closet

The Holy Ghost in Melpomene’s Closet

Echo of Boy

Nosebleed (A Mormon Pilgrimage)

Christus

The Grammar of Quench

Not the Truman Show

Solomon the Wise

Averted Vision

Elegy / Prayer

True Ideas

My Sadness

The Skin of the Story

The Flock

Words

Eight Visions of the First

Dialogue 49.3 (Fall 2016): 151–155
Shiffler-Olsen turns Joseph Smtih’s first-person First Vision accounts into poetry.

Temple

Keeping Faith

October Above Trial Lake

Stony Places

My Sister Once Died

Grief

The Trail

The world was divided into three.  Three shards of sagebrush and sky.  That’s how it looked to Emma as she blinked through the thick wooden wagon spokes next to her head. She winced at the…

Baptism

Ordinary and Profane Poems

Tropical Butterfly House

Kill the Poets

Prophet by the Sea

One late afternoon just before sunset, the Prophet with white hair like the mane of a lion was walking by the sea with his friend, Fernando. They walked and talked about many things as the…

Mormon Conversions

The songs mutate 
like a virus in my blood: 
“I Am a Child of 
God,” “Firm As the Mountains 

From Utah Poems: To Elias

I brought my daughters to your grave
There in the river’s bend 
Not far from where, their age, 
I watched you dedicate the monument
To Jim Bridger: trapper, river-searcher. 

You lay deep in Utah’s summer
So still they couldn’t imagine 
This was their grandfather, 
Yourself a monument now 
To probing dry country.

Boy Diving Through Moss

A boy with joy and fear inside
stood on the plank
above the pond.
He sensed the cold, dark water
underneath,
and, daring,

Mental Gas

Charles to his teacher—Sir, you say
That nature’s laws admit decay—
That changes never cease ; 
And yet you say, no void or space ;
‘Tis only change of shape or place—
No loss, and no increase. 

New Acts of Poetry | Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage, and Dennis Drake, What You Feel, I Share, and Christie Lund Coles, Speak to Me, and Gale Tampico Boyd, the lost, the found

More and more acts of poetry are being committed by Mormons these days. Before me are four volumes attesting to a variety of interests and a variety in printing and format. I am happy to…

On the Precipice: Three Mormon Poets | John Sterling Harris, Barbed Wire: Poetry and Photographs of the West, Clinton F. Larson, Counterpoint: A Book of Poems, and Emma Lou Thayne, Until Another Day for Butterflies

All three of these poets claim, explicitly or implicitly, to be “western,” and it is unlikely that anyone will challenge the claim. Their poems reflect the western landscape, or, more specifically, the Great Basin landscape…

Sacrament of Terror: Violence in the Poetry of Clinton F. Larsen

Dr. Clinton F. Larson has been acclaimed as a Mormon poet, even as the first Mormon poet. In his review of The Lord of Experience Professor John B. Harris seems to have represented many of…

The Poetic Mystique | Marily McMeen Miller Brown, The Grandmother Tree, and Vernice Wineera Pere, Mahanga: Pacific Poems

Beyond the sentience and the craft, under the sound and shape and color of the poem, one seeks the mystique that synthesizes and sets forth a poet’s real reality. Marilyn McMeen Miller  Brown’s book of…

New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women

The sensibility described by Amy Lowell—that there is something odd about women who write serious poetry—is still given substance today by the endangered state of the species. Even I will not waste time counting the few woman poets anthologized before Lowell’s time; contemporary statistics suffice.

Persephone

The trees are making white 
buds. Shrunken heads, 
last year’s berries, hang 
on leafing branches. I do not

Hold

Gray day with a brown leaf refusing 
at the end of a wind to drop, 
why is the crabbed clinging 
so intricate a part of the dance? 

Repapering the Kitchen

We probe and scrape and peel away the faded 
Multicolored layers of a lifetime, 
Like Schliemann 
(Who ? Grandmother asks) 

Gratitude

As I kneel to 
needlepoint nice words 
in quiet 
careful 

Memory’s Duty

Like an irresistible green vegetation 
easing over everything in time, 
a sense of comfort crept over my mother, 
weaving into her slowly tendrils of death. 

Bronzed Cadences

I hear faded trumpet sounds of summer 
and fill my arms with sleepy wildflowers, 
hold them close, feel the damp, 
smell the last fragrance. 

The Golden Chain

Paradise pendant from a golden chain 
opal pendant paradise 
swirling blue and green 
through white cloud streaks: 
golden chain gleaming on the breast of God. 

“Moonbeams From a Larger Lunacy”: Poetry in the Reorganization

Dialogue 16.4 (Winter 1983): 22–31
This study addresses poetry within the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and defines an RLDS poet as someone who belongs to the RLDS church and who has published poetry in some form or other.

The New Mormon Poetry | Lewis Home, The seventh day

A new Mormon poetry is beginning to emerge from the shadow of traditional, more bardic Mormon verse. Peeping about in the bright sun, blinking a bit and rubbing its eyes, it shows itself in poems…

Still Sounds of Winter

Waking from my loud dream 
I hear only what is here: 
the cornered stars rattling in glass 
and the slow roll of a drumhead moon. 

Charm for a Sick Child

we will dream now of a cave 
with a figure at the entrance, 
see the magic seeds she holds 

Another Birth

They dream of going hack. 
            The bars on their beds 
            are fingers before a face. 
Their knees rise up toward chins 

Fishers

In the last days of summer 
we walk through tall grass 
to the river 
long before the sun spills 

Expatriate

The Hawaiians are surprised that we also had beaches. 
            In their minds we represent one vast igloo 
            Filled with people anxious to escape 
            To winter in Hawaii. 

Born Again

As you enter the water unsinning, 
I shall repent eight years 
Of watching in the dark and loving 
Without turning on the light. 

Oil upon Oil

Like the sound of laying the warp, whispered names 
resonate within the grained, muraled, marble 
and curtain walls of this holy place, and veil 
the light and air with your form, hands 

How Much for the Earth? A Suite of Poems: About Time for Considering

The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality, this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1] About Considering Consider is…

Unfinished Sestina for the Secretary of Defense

We were inside the world. 
The children were sleeping. 
Light fell through the window. 
One of us wore red. 

The High Price of Poetry

Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

Returning

Mouth over the reed, 
you empty your feelings 
into the hollow heart. 
These are the pieces left: 

Diaries

I keep diaries in my head 
At night I write on sealed pages 
In dream codes a         sort 
Of dot-dot-dash Morse himself 

David and Bathsheba

When I slid the damask 
from its plastic sleeve 
to spread it on the table, 
the stain throbbed against crisp white. 

Fathering

When I first hold our children, 
Lately having labored alongside you, 
I promised many things — too many — 
Like the alcoholic too late repentant, 

The Interview

Tom looked at the sweat shining in the palms of his hands. Wiping them on his slacks, he opened the door into the stake president’s office and sat in a chair against the wall. A…

Benediction

Ardmoore told Carmen Stavely, who’d been away in Idaho visiting family, that what happened that Sunday morning was absolutely confidential. The bishop had instructed all who’d been present to keep the matter strictly to themselves;…

Lightning Barbs

I’d ridden this way a hundred times, 
Up Monday Town along the fence 
Dividing wheat from perennial sage 
Herding cattle to summer grazing 

One Year

The scene was written 
In advance, 
Rehearsed as often 
As the days of waiting 
Would allow. 

As Winter Comes On

Beyond my chrysanthemums and barbed fence, 
aproned sisters, some in hair nets like cafeteria cooks, 
whisk their casseroles to the kitchen of the old wardhouse. 

This Is My Body

A deacon offers the broken bread. 
Aware of awkward wait as bishop 
Receives the bread of ritual first, 
I take it up, thoughtless of blessing, 

All My Silent Midnight Hours

Things just get worse.
Which heavenly linoleum stripe
Leads to universal Emergency?
The resident angel could scour my soul.

Grains of Life: Fragments of a Sonnet Cycle

If I could give to you a dew-wrapped day, 
You have no need to tell me — I should know 
That you would use it all to make things grow. 
The furling bud, the fruiting branch are pay 

Sonnet for Spring

there’s honeysuckle in the exhaust, a fine green 
beard between walks, spring softens us 
again, now we confess the earth is a drum 
encased in living skin, not concrete, 

For the Bishop’s Wife

Some of us stood together 
on your star-gray lawn, 
sang you Christmas carols 
in the warm California air. 

Grandmother Envisions Her Own Death

A white pillar will glow from the sand as I die. 
Those backyard trees will shake their empty pods 
against the sky. My moldy body will sink 
into its bed, smothered by sinners. 

Winter Burial

Grey clouds, March-heavy hung over 
an old and mottled snow that day 
we brought him there to you. 

Seasoning

That fine white burst of bush blossom 
Has come again. Blast 
ing through the winter crust 
And scattering the afterbirth of spring, 

Nativity

The eyes of the beasts shine into my own. 
The archangel’s hair is on fire. I stumble 
through the mudprints of cows and ewes 
toward the damp side of the cave 

They Have Closed the Church My Father Helped Build

where he sawed through his finger 
now perpetually stiff, 
paid three assessments 

Evenings: His Church Calling

The sound burrs in my head 
like a racket of angry birds 
swirling from the sky. 
He’s gone again; 

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Cancun Beach, Mexico

What kind of God has made this sapphire tide 
stroking the white sand mouth of Yucatan, 
outrageously extravagant, a place 
fit for the baptism of God or kings 

Sons

New grain, you are comely; 
Long, straight, supremely vernal. 
Standing in Earth’s sun 
Unashamed green, 
You sway. 

Recollections from an Ex

mused in several voices 
to the tune of tinkling cymbals 

It wasn’t like she didn’t blend right in. 
In fact, based on the type of clothes she wore, 
People always figured she was from Salt Lake. 
Her skirts were long enough, that’s for sure.

For Brother de Mik

Cupped in your papery palm the rose 
was like a wound, flowering. 
Your wife nodded when we brought it. 
Yes, Papa, yes is pretty. Then 
she put it in a bowl to float 
and wilt on water. 

Lulu: On the Death of a Sister

Gone 
from the pampas. 
The only brunette; 
her first airplane flight at six months. 

Discouragement

                  Discouragement, 
is the adversary’s vision of the work 
revealed to and 

Stones; The Salutation; The Problem; Grandmother, Grandmother, Grandmother; Bishop

Feliz Navidad

No room at the inn, 
For them, anyway. 
It didn’t take ESP to read the situation. 
Just avoiding unpleasantness later. 
He had enough on his mind just then. 

Our Way

we were young 
and war was our way 
we’d fight in class 
or after school 

Luggage

You are required to keep the poundage low: 
two large cases and a carry-on: 
what you take for months overseas. 
In a year of famine, you have volunteered 

Pruned

I have always been a flowering vine, 
Seeking new trellises to trail on, 
Climbing ladders to the sky, 
Lusting over neighbor fences 

To Watch a Daughter Die

To watch a daughter die — 
One could practice a lifetime 
And never do it well. 
The labored hell 

Prayer of a Novice Rebel

Don’t try to drop little nuggets. 
Please, Sir, I mean. 
Or give me too much of a sign. 
I don’t want a sign now— 

Bodies

Weight — 
heavy weighting down 
of airier stuff 
in birth 

A Life Well-Shared | Margaret Rampton Munk, So Far: Poems

In the Fall of 1985 DIALOGUE published Meg Munk’s suite of poems entitled, “One Year.” In a mature voice and through particular images, she dramatized her battle with cancer. In the spring of 1986, this…

Winton Night Walks

At night along the canals 
Dad was best. 
Beside narrow dusty tractor roads 
Slow dark waters, 

August 6

“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!” 
I went, thanking for the first time the crook 
In my spine that stopped me buck naked 
From buck privacy, and took me back to you 

To a Modern Isaac

I’m no Abraham. 
I’ve bowed to a few idols in my day — 
Just somewhat unintentioned. 
Sacrificing children to idols 

Navel

I drive by a red farmhouse 
in the setting sun. Orange morning 
darts through rippled glass. 
High-glossed linoleum 

The Oldest Son Leaves for Nagoya

Surprisingly tall, he looks down toward 
His six-inch shorter father 
And shifts his feet, anxious 
For the moment of departure, awkward in uncertainty

Burial Service

The place they put him seemed extravagant — 
Sprawling flowers, hovering crowd, artificial grass 
To cover up plain dirt. 
The coffin shone, wood lustrous as the new organ 

For Bonnie

Ever since the homestead days, when you, 
The eldest, baked the bread for barefoot boys 
Flushed from the corn for lunch, the care we knew 
Was testimony of your oaken poise. 

Here’s the Church

While the organist pumped 
“Let Us All Press on in the Work of the Lord,” 
and the chorister napped her arms 
like a whooping crane, and some sat there 

Failed Friendship

Sisters nod and smile, 
inclining intimately toward her in the crowded room. 
Years of testimonies shared and friendships deified 
linger in the worn cushions and heavy curtains. 
She brushes jostling shoulders, turns and feels 

Lesser Voices

Sun-circled history 
Paints famous fools 
But leaves plain brown men 
Unremarked 

sonnet on life’s dangers

cop and father, he cautioned us of more 
than boogeymen and fire, in case of snakes, 
freeze where you are, same for skunks and por-
cupines, brave enough to tromp on cracks, 

The Lord’s Table

The banquet table was spread, 
But I could no longer smell 
Satisfaction in the room. 

Two Fishermen in Hong Kong

We couldn’t find anyone 
in that inner-city maze. 
Between thick buildings 

Three Poems for My Mother

For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses

Early Through Winter

Someone went shooting rabbits last night 
blasting any flesh too slow to dodge. 

I track the powdered ground until I toe 
a scarlet gash melted to concrete.

Pure Thin Bones

José Luís was sick. That was why Michelle and Renata stopped by to see him on their way home from missionary zone meeting. They walked with Nielsen, his companion, who had gone to the meeting…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Inadvertent Disclosure: Autobiography in the Poetry of Eliza R. Snow

Three turning points mark the early life of Eliza R. Snow: the 1826 publication of her first newspaper verse, her 1835 baptism as a convert to Mormonism, and her 1842 sealing as a plural wife…

Grandpa

you talk of breakaway stallions 
with hooves poised to strike teeth, 
years on long lean roads past Las Vegas 
selling church pews down the valley. 

Passion Poems | Emma Lou Thayne, How Much for the Earth?

One might suspect that a book of poems published by Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms Race might possess as interesting a history as the poems that comprise it. How Much for the Earth? by…

A Lot to Like | Eugene England and Dennis Clark, eds., Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems

Harvest is a good title for this collection of twentieth-century Mormon poetry with its bounty, variety, and degrees of ripeness and appeal. One feels a generosity of spirit emanating from this aggregate, a poetic vision…

One of the Women

One of the women inside me 
cannot rejoice with anyone. 
She stays in the shadows 
bowing her head. 
Her long hair has never been cut. 

The Slow Way Home

She leaves the women in her husband’s house 
and makes a slow way home 
to her own mother, to friends singing 
as they bring sweet butter 
for the first month, molasses 

Deity

Who is he from the Sunday pulpit 
acquiring the air of sins 
with his lecture, 
hell’s woes never hidden 

Daddy Hung Me Out

He hung me next to the load of dripping clothes. 
I was just a child! Couldn’t walk! Couldn’t talk! 
Too frozen stiff to cry! But strong enough 
to clench my monkey fists around the line. 
I still can see the pomegranate bush. 

The Blood in My Veins

Tonight while combing my long dark hair, 
                        Sprinkled with strands of white, 
                                    I am grateful for my legacy 
            And wish others would not look down 

If I Had Children

If I had children, I might name 
them astrometeorological names: 
Meridian, a girl. Zenith, a boy. 
Eclipse, a pretty name for either one. 

I Can Wait For

I purposely forget what you look like 
so each time I see you I am surprised 
again by your beauty. Your name is the 
charm I offer nervous cats instead of 

Heartbreak Hill

I go to Brenda’s wedding wearing 
her ex-husband’s cast-off temple garments. 

The Next Weird Sister Builds a Dog Run

With fortune’s damned 
            quarreling smile, 
                        the neighbors complain 

Transformation

I had wanted your wife 
to be born to the graces, 
elegantly muted 
in dove-gray and gloves, 
to take tea from fine china, 
walk perfumed in silk. 

A Call Before the Obituary

His name, distant to me, 
opened your mouth to blackness. 

It seemed you laughed before 
the half-crow caw fell out.

Island Spring

Always she is there on that far island
in my mind, where it is always night,
and the moon tears into a world of leaves,
and is torn. A child, she steps 

Innocence

I confess I have invented a word 
for the thing I am and the thing I have done. 

It is a pleasant word and may be spoken 
to young children or written in their books.

I Consider Jonah’s Whale

You must have been lonely, 
slowly swimming 
in that vast darkness, 
waiting 

Burn Ward

Late at night, the kids in their rooms come 
drifting towards me, thinking of home, perhaps, 
wrestling a kiss fire of pain. 
And the ward is yellow with breathing, 

Sisters

My sister and I had no whispered secrets 
between us, shared no hollyhock days. 

Being Baptized for the Dead, 1974

It throbbed a little, the gash in my left palm. 
I pressed the gauze, something to finger 
while we waited —boys here, girls over there, 
all of us wearing jump suits heavy enough 

In the Back Lot at Hillview Manor

On any given Thursday, 
Papa adjusts the strap 
And plucks out a phrase or two 

Baptism: As Light as Snow

Cool, waist-high, 
shallowerthanremembered; 
eight years ago, it seemed 
that I would float. 

One Sunday’s Rain (After Word of My Father’s Illness)

All morning: rainwater 
off the roof onto pebbles 
washed smooth of pale soil 
in the garden. 

The Dark Gray Morning

The dark gray morning has its eye on you
Forget about the stormy
you have more pressing worries. What to do?
The dark gray morning has its eye on you

Cure

The white man is loud, 
he is also blind. 
His dreams are bad 
and teach him nothing. 

The Virgin Mary Confronts Mary of Magdala

Don’t say that. 
I never called you whore. 
It’s a dream word I never knew. 

How Could We Have Known

that loneliness is like 
the whole of the moon 
rising in a sky so lucent, 
the clouds cast shadows 

The Perseids

Nerved sparks, the Perseids 
tonight, wincing out over Loafer 

Father, you taught me to name
these — each streak of fire

Mechanics

They tell us now 
That the darkness of space 
Is what’s left over, 

The Hero Woman

When the days drag on like TV reruns,
The Hero Woman conies. 
She walks in with long strides from the hips.
She keeps her eyes on the horizon. 

Patchwork

The fields south of Salt Lake 
Must be old. 
From the air, in October, 
They lie barren, empty, 

Losing Lucy

Just as we were meeting, she 
Slid quick away—too far— 
And I, surprised at sudden loss, 
Ran leaping after her. 

Nickel Girls

Sometimes boys would stand 
on the high school stairs 
and throw nickels at girls 
in low-cut blouses, hoping 

Over Coffee, 600 B.C.

A friend of mine told me — 
so I know it’s true — 
she saw someone in the road 
behind her house 

Song of the Old/Oldsongs | Leatrice Lifshitz, Only Morning in Her Shoes: Poems about Old Women

As Leatrice Lifshitz explains in her introduction, this unusual collection of verse represents “an attempt to return old women to the circle, to the continuum of women and of life” (p. viii), and its rich…

Ovum

The egg insists on its own reality, 
So I go along, easy, not one 
To counter what I don’t know. 

The Good Life

Why do I strain for a freedom found outside,
Where worlds in time and space lie wide and full?
My room is closed and airless while the tide
Slaps up the pier and churns me in its pull.
And yet old times of weary venturing pall. 

Jackrabbits

Grandma teased us 
for the time it took 
to kill one jackrabbit 
on our backyard picnic table. 

Waiting

The absence of a signal 
is itself information, 
a zero giving meaning to binary ones. 
The call that doesn’t ring, 

A Vision of Judas

The light was too harsh 
in the South. All day 
I sat beneath that tree 
growing darker and darker 
until I was all shade. 

Two Sisters Visit Dieppe

We leave the town at noon 
For a beach of white pebbles 
And small, clean bones. The wind 
Whips our sensible skirts, and sun glints 

Celebrations | Emma Lou Thayne, Things Happen: Poems of Survival

The publication of a new book of poetry is an occasion for celebration, particularly when the poetry is by such a generous and great-hearted soul as Emma Lou Thayne. But the title of this volume,…

When I Swam for the Utah Valley Dolphins

My mom could sleep each night 
without waking except 
when my ear ached so much 
I became a nightmare 

The Mistake of the Psycholinguists

They say people nominalize too much. 
We tell ourselves, “I am in pain,” 
instead of simply, “I hurt.” 
“Pain is not a prison you’re locked in,” they say. 
“You hurt because you choose to hurt, 
and you can choose to not hurt.” 

Art and Half a Cake

On Saturday mornings, mother baked good bread. 
She always called my two sisters, 
My two brothers, and me 
To come and eat the crusts hot, 
Spread with butter and strawberry jam 
Made from strawberries she had picked and washed. 

My Mormon Grandmother

“Another girl.” 
            Unheralded birth 
                        Beginning nothing. 

Coney Island Hymn: Shore

They clap their hands together 
            and shout out 
            and sing the same song 

The 20/20 Leap

I approach God— 
the distance is immense. 
My vision is clear, 
I am not. 

Ecclesiastical Check

White pawn moves 
forward two steps 
onto an open square. 
A black knight in grace 

Woman Bathing | Authority

She performs the persistent ritual of cleansing, 
the splashing of water 
upon her scarlet apple flesh 
sullied with blood 

Hands

In the chapel, 
In the straightbacked 
Ache of the pew, 
We held them—lap toys 

Missionary Court

Hunched over and rocking a little, 
he answered the president in stutters, 
and I wrote it all down in the ledger— 
the girl’s name, how many times, my pen touching 

Late

I mourn my father. 
I am afraid to relive him 
lest my heart break. 

Relativity

While a hummingbird scans it for wires 
the red rosebud explodes in slow motion, 
the two velocities firing simultaneously. 
Riddled with inconsistencies, the rose is 

Return (for my father)

Over the terra cotta earth 
your truck like a cleft-foot goat 
grazes homeward. 
The down of trees in the hills 

Manna in the Desert

“The satisfaction brought by morning dew 
is more than human stomachs can endure,” 
the men insist, hoping that they will die. 
“The satisfaction brought by morning dew 

Variation on a Love Letter

I have written this letter to you before 
and I will write this letter to you again. 
In it I tell you that the days are starkly blue
and unbearably warm, that the cooling storms

The Book Handed Her

Wanting to be one of twelve princesses 
to disappear down a trap door 
underneath her bed each night 
and dance to weariness in a haunted place 

Winter Fast Offerings

When no one was faking sick, we were nine — 
just enough to cover the routes if someone 
doubled up. We argued over the packets, 
weighing thickness against distance, 

Entire Unto Himself

Already cold and stiff by the time I arrived, 
It was a shallow shadow, gray against black; 
A collar of blood fringed its matted coat. 

The Pulpit

It is a last bastion, 
The pulpit. Prominent 
Among muscular box shapes; 
Fenced off and jutting skyward 

Yellow Hair

I have got a blond, it’s true. 
The others comment, 
laugh behind their hands: 
where did that one come from? 

Sestina for the Coming Fall

In fall, I try to understand the dying 
of so many innocent leaves. The changes 
happen imperceptibly, till the once-verdant is carmine 
or golden, but such pulsing color is only 
prelude to their silent fall to the dark flesh 
of life that decayed before them. A nectarine 

Saint Theresa and the Lepress

Few teeth remain in her mouth, 
And the mouth exhales rottenness. 
I turn my back, my nose. 
Still she presses in. 

What El Salvador Meant to a Three-year-old

an iguana in our empty pool 
            his eyes jumping wild 

a metal fence around the yard 
            where naked boys waited outside for food

Beth-lehem

Jacob and Rachel 
But a little way to come to Beth-lehem, 
and the pains came hard upon her. She heard, 
“Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.” 

Night Myths

Sleepless with fever, 
under one small lamp you stared 
at a cherry wood cabinet, dark whorls 
spiraled like galaxies and polished 

Notes for a Son, 19, Living Abroad

Often when entering sleep 
I start awake, your form having drifted 
into vision, your name embedded 
in the thickness of my tongue. 

Snowy Night

Whose poem this is, I think I know— 
New England bard of spring and snow, 
But eighth-grade teachers don’t explain 
The depths to which the poets go. 

Becoming a Writer

Early on, in class, the smooth new pencils, 
the ice-white paper, copper-bladed rulers, 
all spoke order, a progression of lines. 

Breadcrumbs

The fairytales were wrong: 
to identify big feet 
with wicked stepsisters, ugly with unloved, 
princes and frogs with anything 

Exercising the Priesthood

A Wednesday evening 
down in the back 
of the chapel, we played 
King of the Mountain on the 

Postcard

I debated hours, whether to send you a kiss 
by the river or the overabundant lips 
of a Rosetti madonna. You get both: See 
the pansies the madonna holds? That’s how I know

Litany

All night, all day, angels 
watching over me, my Lord. 

And him slipping off, 
letting the door close

Household of Faith

From where we sat on the fourth pew 
the three square windows looked like cubes 
of shimmery gold 
vertically stacked 

God With Us

At the baptismal Erma sings “Que grande es El,”
her voice breaking, 
and the woman she has brought to Jesus, 
clothed in white on the front row, weeps. 

A Body That Expands

My sister sings Puccini in the shower. 
A fever ripped the muscle of her heart 
when she was five but now she is almost 
twenty-one and lovely. She leaves music 

Double Exposure

The picture gathers from a host of things— 
From giggles of remembering, not play 
By play but one word lifting from another 
Into a rearview record, a happy weather 

Sacrament Prayer

It’s the simplicity I like, no pulpit thunder, 
no fiery “Thou shalt nots” rattling the soul. 
A set prayer, phrases you can roll around 
your mouth all week, then string together 

Brando

Marlon Brando’s such a babe in Guys and Dolls,
it’s an ideal, makes you feel 
positively reverent, same as orange blossoms, 
the way they delicately ask to seduce 

Warren Travels With His Father

in the 
dense Montana heat, the BLM vehicle musty 
and smelling of oil, sweat, and age. 

Decoration Day

No funeral today, but the town 
has business at its cemetery. 
Dust leads the procession; 
handles of rakes and hoes protrude 

Day Dreams

Man of her house, her rooms 
Are haunted by dreams. 

Leavened by cool morning light, 
Loft become sanctum, he lolls

Sole Makers

I wonder if I can still heal myself? 
I’ve done it once before, 
back when I cut my palm open 
trying to be your blood brother. 

The Man Without Sin

There’s this house where 
four retarded men live who 
go to church on Sundays. 

Lancashire Saint Dies

He wanders the back alleys of his childhood
Mossed and decaying bricks
Tower skyward to imprison him
Cobbles rise to thwart his escape

Leave of Absence

walk out and arrive 
near the lake— 
any route taken 
leads eventually 
to this 

Resurrection

One gunmetal day, late fall, 
a fat shabby robin tired 
of flying in her natural world, 
desired to swoop across our couch, 

Our Fecundity

What have we done? 
This wrinkled child 
did not ask for entry; 
it answered our call 

For My Father, 1934-1990

Have you noticed, then, that sound moves 
differently in fall—such falling 
of leaves, a fall 
from warmth and 

Mama and Daddy Standin’ By

Best thing that ever happened 
In church was when Martha 
Got Nancy to sing “Summertime” 
On Mother’s Day— 

In Passing To Her Fathers

In Saint George, Lena McCain had cancer. 
She set her house in order. 

In Las Vegas, the doctors went after the cancer with a knife,
            got it, watched her closely.

Bean Counting

She adds up all the names 
people have given her over the years: 
‘Vain, difficult, cold.” 
Someone once told her that 

I Have Learned 5 Things

1. The sulfurous flame 
            sunbeams in corners 
                        lightning like cracked glass 
                                    the bulb of an idea 
                                                your dark eyes 

Aspens

Parchmental stand aspens, 
Paper atrmeble accepts scars, 
Words healing standing parchmental 

Magi

Through Perean hills and Arabian desert,
pacing our journey by the pulsing star, 
we come here, finally, to this quiet shelter
that houses the holy—to Bayt al-Lahm. 

Commentary

Wedged into the same chair, 
my husband and son station 
themselves, duplicates 
of each other. 
Too tired to talk, 
my son listens. 

Ireland

When did I find the music 
of another open-window autumn? 
I’ve left more vodka empties near 
the wardhouse dumpster. 

To Joseph of Nazareth: Patron Saint of Fathers Dispossessed

Joseph, I too have known that sad angelic word
Visitation 
Which renders a father not-father. 
Your children 

Hobby Horses

What holds us together is our discourse— 
hints and asides, a whisper in the cloakroom, 
School of the Prophets held across the backyard hedge.
Stealth gives Adam-God a reviving breath, 
let Gog and Magog flex their muscle in the U.N. 

Movements Giving Off Light

Drops of water stretch and hold 
in the sunlight: the small icicle 
sways from the eaves in the thaw. 
I see it fall 
because I have come to the window 
at this moment. 

Mummy Pendulum

A man’s last wish 
should be sacred. 

I want to be wrapped 
like a ball of roots

Sariah

She’s not Abraham’s Sara, 
who laughs and talks 
to angels 
as if the state of her womb 

Jesus is Coming

The tapping of the shower is 
the insistent brush of reeds 
along the Charles and the slap 
of oars I’ve just left. 

Marcus

It is not that I miss you now 
but I miss it—when I 
swallowed your finger the first night 
and restrained myself in deference to 

Secrets under the Surface | Linda Sillitoe, Crazy for Living: Poems

Just under the surface of the obvious lie the secrets. Linda Sillitoe sees, hears, tastes them, feels where they lead, trusts them, takes us along. It is never a perilous journey. Rather, it resounds with…

The Invisible Woman

The invisible woman is angry. 
Boy is she mad. 
She took her books to the library last night 
and last night she burned the library down. 

Going Dark

            To escape from pursuers 
I flee to the car, 
gun the gas down the highway. 
            They’re on my tail. 

Serving the Papers

They sit in stiff unmatched recliners, 
a faint halo of grease smearing 
the head rests. The Bishop asks again, 
Do you want your names removed? 

His Sermon

He says there’s very little truth 
in the world 
and he can’t wait to go out, 
preach, and spread his own— 
like he has the corner on it. 

Nestling

They hatched today. Last night 
when I peeked among the apples 
they were eggs, four, end to end 
among twigs and scraps and a twitch 

For the Girl Who Saw Her Mother Cold

July twenty-third in the canyon is 
almost like hell-fire—sulfurous hot 
waves off the powdery earth while 
the children play in the trees, 

A Courtship

I remember the great bear 
circling the blue night, 
the black juniper and no motion. 

On X-ing

crossed out—an inexact word in typescript 
            but not erased 
left unused—an unread book 
            but not unneeded 

My mama’s hands

can hold eight eggs 
when she walks from the 
refrigerator to the stove, 
bacon fat popping out 

Storytime

Even now in the stony 
courtyard under withered
vines the characters 

Early Winter

Home from the dance in a howling blizzard. 
The kitchen door blown open. 
A heap of snow swirled onto linoleum. 
I’m entranced at the violence, 

Clean

Creekbottom 
pushes up between our toes 
like mushrooms. 
Summer water 

In a Far Land

So many women on their knees 
that if I knew how to tell them 
they could find hope here, 
or that there the men 

Pilgrimage

After ten hours of driving, out of the old station wagon.
My mother, roadworn, care poor, 
steps over the fallen gate. 

Basilica

Frank’s photos—
are like his fiction—
show clean, hard lines. 

Bathing a Child

            Elbow-deep in shallow water 
            with porcelain pressed against my breast 
I dragged the sudsy washcloth 
over your squirming body 

The Violent Woman

Sarah your clarinet 
body squeaks at the valves, moans 
off key, and lying still 
and flat as a paper doll 

Naked

I was expecting ripened avocadoes, Michael, 
or half-used spices—the usual throwaways before
a move. Not a grocery bag of garments, unopened,
each slippery package a skin you never tied on.

Cap Meets the Prophet Brigham

On the third day he stopped for a deserved rest,
though not intentionally. The bishop, she explained,
was hunting pheasants and wouldn’t be back
for hours. So he collapsed into a straw bed 

1844

Signs in the heavens. Great arcs of light
at midday. Drew it. Intend 
to ask Joseph what it means … 

Snows

That snow falling out there, not in flakes 
But in clusters of flake, little snow balls 
Loosened by November’s sun still barely struggling
Through the harvest haze, snow falling 

The Time Traveler Comes to Cana

So I went to Cana and spent Sabbath 
in that house, their guest, before the wedding.
The daughter spoke with joy of her marriage;
the mother sat impatient—Sabbath’s end 

March Children

Her head nestled in the palm of my hand 
not so long ago, 
little lips tugged my breast, 
fingers pink as birthday candles 

Negative Space

It’s hard being Mormon Mormon mind regards nipples

Razor Sharp

You, my father, 
Too damned independent at seventy-five 
To admit you could no longer handle 
A simple double-edge Gillette, 

1948

She was learning German that year, 
a war bride, living in Darmstadt, 
trying to say ich in the back of her throat, 
the guttural r of Herr and Frau, to introduce 

The Three Boats

And God came to me and shewed me 
a boat on troubled waters. 
“Shall you stretch forth your hand 
to steady the vessel before it founders?” 
“I shall,” I said, and took the boat 
in my hand and removed it from danger. 

Weight

He was folding garments in the back bedroom
when he heard one of his kids telling 
his wife that his ex had “lost a lot of weight”— 

hospital healing

of course a two-inch badger 
carved from liver-colored stone 
with arrows bound to his back, 
could not make the difference. 

Sleeping on Wood

The blue ice is melting 
off the high ridge, 
draining down through the trees. 
The blade of rock darkens in the sun.

RELEASE: A Moment

I did not plan survival or otherwise 
            craving absence for so long 
so when awakened that snowless night 

The Freeway

is two currents of light on the hill. 
One drains into the western sky, 
the other, into the maw of rock behind me.
I am a dazzled part of light that opens 

How Things Look from the Other Side of the Lake

Put water between the highway and yourself; 
put a fence too, and some cows to graze. 

For as long as you sit on this rock, 
you are not driving north or south,

Cereal Polygamy

One of his had just spilled 
some Cheerios, and one of hers 

was griping over the Grapenuts. 
He was about to holler

Brides of the Afternoon

White brides, dark grooms 
lustrous silks on 
an orange afternoon, 
scuffing through dry leaves 

Slant Sonnet for Melissa

This visit you talk of Merlin in both poem and prose,
and how he transformed Arthur to insect or mole,
teaching him how to become. 

Ghost Month

In China, in August, ghosts are released 
from hell for a month of fun. Late July 
behind the gates, ghosts start queuing up, 
raising their hands and swearing to the guards

Reply to: “You Are a Spiritual Person”

Something wants spiritual 
yet hesitates, not wanting to show a lack 
of substance   intellect 
to not win at tennis or good looks 

Toni’s Song

She prays in the shower, lifts 
her face to the streaming water 
god, to the shining metallic head 

Because Last Night Was Friday Night

Because last night was Friday night 
I had to search to find a quiet place 
and when I found it I wanted to leave it 
though I wasn’t even working off a mean gin drunk. 

Saturday: One Version (Fourth Week of an Unidentified Illness)

Tired of enclosure, I sit near what view 
of trees and sky my house will give. 
Across the back fence, my neighbor 
who can hardly walk 

The Prophet’s Dream

An angel came to me and said, O Pitiable Fools! 
O Foolish Mortals! O Everlasting Damnation! 
I said, Perhaps you will be willing to shew me 
their eternal lot, and my own. He said, Come. 

What Remains

Day rolls over, 
pulling at the covers of dusk. 
Lights come on in sequence 
and before they go off 

Aristocrats

Two black snakes 
Made it down the hill 
Through the high grass 
Among the wild apple trees 

His Faith-Promoting Story

Thirty-six years after his baptism, 
nobody was converted. 

His grown kids were apostates, and his exes 
were either nudists or inactives

Bread: A Returning

In the hayfields are loaves 
to be lined along barns. 
Like monuments to a lost art 
they have browned in the summer heat, 

The Statue of Brigham Young at South Temple and Main, Salt Lake City

The cupping hand cradles the winds 
that whir like crickets 
beneath the swoop of traffic lamps. 
The legs like stumps of pillars 

I Will

Bitter herbs and tears 
Mulch, water the spiritual 
Roots of human neuroses 
Surely God sees through 

Hemmed In

Above, the divorcee 
with the baggy eyes and bleached hair
draws an evening bath. 
The dull pat of bare feet 

A Killing Frost

When the cold front came, all the leaves went limp.
That was that—no more white flies on the patio,
one bloom still curled tightly in its calyx, 
its promise of color fading. Yet there’s nothing

George

He speaks in a poetry of mumbles, not quite rambling
under the breaking sky about what happened 
half his life ago and the end of a promise 
that makes him angry. Shows the confusion 

Descending Order

Snow falling into the pond 
leaves you weak with its metaphor 
of sadness, as though all that makes you
could be instantly broken down, 

Untitled

Sing a song of sixth sense, 
a pocket full of Why; 
four and twenty Reasons, 
beams in your eye. 

Fall Weekend at Rehoboth Beach

Out along the shore the sky is wide. 
Ducks fly, drafting like cyclists in Central Park 
but unfettered, their path dictated only by season, instinct,
and windshifts. Below with me 

In a Far Land

So many women on their knees 
that if I knew how to tell them 
they could find hope here, 
or that there the men 

They Eat Dogs in China

            Or so my father said— 
the clock on the mantle silenced, 
            that family Bible 
                        in his hands a weight in the pans 

Gaining Darkness

Going down to the cellar 
a child awakens to tendrils 
of winter vegetables 
that elongate like white worms.

American Christians Visit Mt. Nebo

We had only cameras 
and yearning, but the wind rasped 
stone like a hot tongue 
and cameras and yearning 

The Miró Exhibit at MoMA*: Dec. 21, 1993

These bodies 
look like they were pancake mix 
that, when poured on the skillet, 
turned out to look sort of human.

Pieta

Lying on my mother’s bed 
listening to tropical rain skitter 
across a mottled screen, 
I hold my daughter, sprawled in sleep,

She’iiná Yázhí*

As earth began to shed the snowy clouds of
death and slumber, 
as darkness ebbed within the solstice, 
you slept in my dark womb, 

“I Do Remember How It Smelled Heavenly”: Mormon Aspects of May Swenson’s Poetry

Any discussion of Mormon culture or doctrine in the work of nationally prominent American poet May Swenson must begin with the caveat that Swenson, for virtually all of her adult life, was not a believing…

By Extension

He blisters his hand on the iron she forgot to unplug,
investigates every outlet, detects exactly three more
potential fire hazards, bandages himself 
in the prescribed method. She is not a cautious woman.

August

Ahumming stillness. In the orchards up and down the valley
the pith of summer turns slowly to juices. Ripeness:
what my grandmother knows, hunched in her silence.

The Greening

Pluck them out one by one 
Melancholy, dearth, unableness 
Squeeze out the poisons 
Scratch away the sting 

Origami Birds

I release my pretty doves 
and they ascend like sparks 
to disappear. And look 
how restless I am, 

Properties of Water

In the dark, 
a cat will fly on rain-slicked blacktop 
like a bat, 
hydroplaning, flicking malevolence sideways
out of fluorescent eyes. 

Seconds Coming

Entering St. John 
Population 1440 

Leaving St. John 
Visit Us Again!

Awake to the Ineffable: Some Would Call It Kundalini

Out of sleep 
Levitation 
Stirrups of light 
Palms aglow 

To Sleep with the Ineffable: Inviting My Sweet Informants

Cheek to pillow I slide my scalp up 
away from my ear the way I lifted the mother of pearl stem on the
silver lid 
that closed and opened to disappear under itself 

The Soon-to-hibernate Bear Addresses His Public

Slow way down. 
Get off the freeway. 
Park the car. 
Stop racing the engine. 

“White” of “Pure”: Five Vignettes

Dialogue 29.4 (Winter 1996): 119–135
The Book of Mormon variously uses “white” and “pure” in the same verse in different editions. This article traces the history of those changes, who was behind them, and why.

Leaving

Leaving you 
leaves me wishing that I could hold you
like a small stone in my pocket 

Black Moroni

Painted on the wall behind the seats where choir sings 
See the shining figure in a steep green wood 
Angel wears a shirtwaist robe, fabric wing as thin as filament
He looks downslope where Joseph kneels, treasure spread in dirt

Life-line

Tonight I wear your dress 
like a shell to my most graceless springing. 
The brown velvet shimmers with the folds 
and the tucks hang like loosely gathered wind, 

Silver Footprints

Neither masculine nor feminine a powerful 
androgyny like wind surrounding shoulders
of a crowd, drawing in, along, persuasive as scent. 

Alaska Girlhood

Eden was a winter 
when gods skated the earth. 
They’d warm themselves by the fires 
that lit the man-high snowbanks 

We Dress for Armageddon

for Shelley Turley

When trouble—an earthquake, a heart— 
Comes to town, breaking dams, 
Leveling shops, clubs

Kick and Muff

I hear the fist-sized heart 
cannon in the fog of rhythm 
death and future. 
From it I take the few things 

Shorn

Locking the door to the bath, 
opens the collar of the shirt, 
raises chin, fingers buttons 
from their holes, lengthens torso,
molts like a snake. 

Passing On, Holiday

It’s Christmas 
and our mothers, weary in their memories,
in their good for others (those holiday chores)
keep their feet under them like birds.

Fire in the Water

Barely a man 
he stands trembling 
water lapping at thighs in cotton white
right arm to the square 

Oasis

At dusk, the pool waits in silence, 
found by your feet after you rip up 
the map. Suddenly in the tangled grasses
and twilight the birds stop calling, 
and the trees finger your face. 

Desert Bloom

There are no maybes in the desert; 
you have to be lizard-quick or shrivel and die. 
The Rio Grande is muddy from its occasional pause,
here where survival is yes or no. 

Stake Mission

Their place was a junkyard with Joshuas,
and they’d play Mom and Pop 

to any delinquent on the desert. 
We’d be forever having

Kayenta

Summers we paint relocation houses 
on the res, beige and grey, 
“Navajo white/’ our brushes dripping
Dutch Boy on red Arizona earth. 

Moon Phases: Childhood

when it topped the mountains 
the shell of moon laid down 
            such plenty 
                        all over the fields 

Mountain Turn-out: Week After My Father’s Funeral

In the ghost-smoke of eight thousand feet, 
the road back looks deserted. 
Below me, a hawk rises, 
wings throbbing stillness, and I watch 

Father Sky/Mother Earth

I am turning the irrigation water 
Into my garden 
It’s two in the afternoon 
The reddening tomatoes jerk up, widen their eyes

How She Comes

Like a storm rowing in. All around tree limbs stagger,
weeds lie flat. Wind and sun like familiars, 
canyons nesting in the shadows. Bright feet 
never touching down, while the air boils behind her

Fall Is the Wrong Analogy

this hesitant collapsing 
of a canopy that will billow 
in windy spring— 

Martyrs

A brigade of ants marching over torsos 
cast in bronze. The mouths that cannot speak 

On the Death by Cancer of Someone Too Young

for Jeffrey Montague 

Your wondering is over. 
A radiance has taken you. 
Now part of the council of all beings

Woodwork

He squints and turns the beam around,
swapping it end for end. He runs 
his eye down the length of the crown
and sees an overall design 

Take These Depositions

Let’s talk of griefs, 
of wombs, 
of epithets. 

Straw

The straw of the cut grain 
Gold mounding the hill 
On the way down from my house 
On the mountain 

Birthday Dreaming

Sixty-four years ago my grandmother was shifting in her sleep, admiring her growing belly with gentle hands, welcoming the October nightfall that enclosed her like prayer. That’s how pregnancy is, ordinary things move on without…

“Watercress Grows Best in Running Water”

Days after his death, I felt him 
newly jovial alongside me. And weeks later,
when I again dreamed him young, 
handing me a pail of watercress, 

Lily Foot

Did I hold the tiny Chinese shoe
or simply gaze at it 
encased in museum glass 
in the old mining town 

Templum: A Place Thought of as Holy

I. The coming 

Inside this precise granite 
the immensity of the walk comes home

After a Late Night, Waiting

Again, that rim before sleep: 
            I tried to pause there—listened 
to the mantle clock, the distant 
            sprung rhythm of a dog barking, 

Out of the Night: Childness

From my Mystic Life after near-death accident 

More than a state of being 
A new being 
Suffused in light

Sacrament Hymn

Jesus Deathkiller, 
God’s Lifer, Earth Rover, Gift: 

Be sure, 
in your name and our hope,

From the Land of Nod

I will go on 
loving you, even after 
you have stopped loving 
anyone. What if 

Holy Sonnet for Mother’s Day

No need to pierce my side with soldier’s sword 
Or bleed from every pore as in Gethsemane; 
Designed by Thee to shed blood naturally 
Cycling with the menstrual moon. Lord, 

History

Small things: 
the smell of 

blocks he cut 
from pine light

A Prayer Addressed to Lord of Death

O Yama, God of Death, wield not your arrogant power!
Shield me from your wrath and dark terror. 
You well know that you’ll succeed. 

Mormontage

baptism— 
separation anxiety 
immergency 

Allelujah

When the semicircle is complete, 
each pedestal placed aesthetically 
on stage, the girls enter. 
Thirty earnest seraphs 

Long Distance

So now you sit with a black eye 
by a glass wall on the sixteenth floor. 
Already I see our talk in paragraphs 
I can’t read, topics in the margin, 
one clear sentence about clutter. 

At Fifty-Five

Was he improving, 
or just too tired to sin? 

Regardless, it was pretty clear 
that where his broken heart and contrite

Alder and Maple in Molting

Leaves 
rusted and dry 
fall to the earth 

Creations: Mississippi

Adam, I know, 
came from this red clay. 

I am ever created 
of dust.

Multiply and Replenish

Adam’s sperm number 
one hundred million per cubic centimeter,
hope he can comply with God’s command. 

Sesquicentennial Pioneer Commemoration Speech

My grandpa Walker Reynolds was a pioneer, too, with a Brigham beard.
Mom says he loved pickles, and dancing music. 
Last time we saw him, Grandma said, “It’s time to hug goodbye,”
and all I could think is how Grandpa’s 

Soft Sculpture

I sink into a beanbag chair 
shaped like a giant ear 
but changing shape to fit my rear 

Basic Training

We were like filings, lifted straight 
As though a magnet stiffened up 
Our figures like the hair upon 
Our closely cropped skulls. But we, 

She and He: Alternatives

—Or on summer evenings as the sky 
Draws down its light, prodding the question why 

They sit in cast-off wicker furniture, 
The kids cross-legged as though the lawn made a shore

Lectures on Death at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

The ranger stoops to toss a stick away 
and points to a narrow hole dug in the mud. 
“Snakes,” she says, “are plentiful this year; 
there’s some bubonic plague in rodents here.” 

On the Fringe — The Singles’ Ward (The Appeal of the Foyer)

The quick exit— 
Space, windows, safety. 
Cozy couches and easy 
Chairs versus the hard 

Widow’s Weeds

Black 
is the absence of color 
to which the eye adjusts. 
Black magnifies the face of 
the beloved. 

Thistle Field

So speaks King Saul: 
I want this modest man of war
David, dead. 
Snare him with a string 

Straight Up

Shirley is the punch line who holds the joke 
while we wait like pieces on a game board 
in the line that wanders 
from the classrooms, through the halls, 

Miguel

I meet Miguel 
bear hugging him from behind 
tense tendons in his neck 
rage squeezing out his eyes: 

One Method of Hope

The only motion here is an old 
Dodge pickup leading a coil 
of white exhaust across 
the horizon—a snow-dusted 

Lucifer’s Obit.

            We note, today, the passing 
of our most dreared departed— 
father of lies, child of perdition, 
mother of woes, and friend to sin. 

Begotten of the Ash

Born of the ash, 
Bloom of the dust 
Fires of the soul, 
Colors of rust 

Joseph Loved His Women

Joseph loved his women 
beginning with strong Lucy 
who prayed him back to health. 
He loved his sister Sophronia, 

To a Cymbidium Orchid Blooming on December 25th

You must have burst surprised 
thrusting up your single spear 
so soon past All 
Hallow’s-Eve 

Fashion Show

Did she think, “Depression,” 
            As banks collapsed, 
Men took to the road, farms 
            Reclaimed and lost? 

Ordinary Light

One hour of a particular day, 
like a sudden flu it descends upon you 
the first time. 
You could not have known. 

Fact of my life

My job was once threatened if I published a poem.
I lived in another place 
but in America and knew my rights. 
I let the poem wait. Oh, I read it aloud once

We Write What We Want to Know

I want to know why water has the right of way
where God dwells near zenith or nadir 
why you see stars better peripherally 
why some people have a fear of trees 

My Father Comes to Me

My father comes to me 
his hand scrapes on the door 
that he opens to this bedroom where I am still, 
not sleeping but waiting for his hair oil scent to reach me.

To a College Friend Killed by a Drunk Driver

In those days 
we all wanted a man 
to cover our shame, the nakedness 
of being a woman alone. 
A degree yes unless 
The Knight came 

Drama Queen

The week they turn off your phone, 
I wait in your car while you give quarters 
to a pay phone mounted on red brick 
at a convenience store. 

Night Fires

Family sentinels, we watch flames grab scrub oak
roughly on the shoulder of our dysphoric mountain,
shiver as three firs’ tired arms collapse in slow motion
silence. 

Women are the Keepers of Secrets

Women keep the secrets of men 
by candlelight and telephone, 
growing in their wombs. 

A Name and a Blessing

I raise you my just born daughter 
to the Father of All Lights. 
He has set a flame in you; 
this fire connects you to the trees 
the earth and creeping things. 

Luke 7:37

The alpha and omega sat at meat. 
The woman could not speak. She only knelt 
And wept. Translucent tears upon his feet 
Flowed like river waters to the Delta. 

Courting

I. Prayer 

Bless us as we try to find 
ourselves, 
each other.

If the Din of Cities Makes the Moon

If the din of cities makes the moon 
shine dimly in the night; 
if the touch of concrete and tin 
drowns the sound of water; 

Dragging Fanny

Her last hymn in the book—and they’re dragging it.
Behold, her royal army’s old. Band of stragglers,
banners furled, tired voices buckling the pews. 

Afterward

Once on the porch I asked 
great-grandfather Porter a question 
loudly and he said wait 
though he was just sitting still 
his face raised to low sun 
eyes half-open 

Above the Estuary (Before the trail closure through Cascade Preserve)

The river’s long curve 
enters the bay in streak between meadow 
and forest—algae green of freshwater, 
kelp green of salt. 

Metaphysics over lunch

English professor and rebel: 
Off campus, our sentences race 
the tabletop, garbed in wit and color. 
By the time food comes, our ideas dance 

Caught Gull, Plowing

At five, standing at the edge of the field, 
Dad up there on the great green Deere, 
I must have been scared he’d leave. 
He made me an offer: Catch me a seagull 

Companionship

We’d had problems, especially lately: 
Just last week I snapped at him 
and found myself staring into the outraged eyes 
of a former national rugby star, his one fist 

Clay

On the sill, torsos wrenched out of clay 
still bore the sculptor’s mark, the print 

of cocked thumb and nail. Tortured, vaguely
female, they shamed us. We crowded in,

The First Christmas Eve at Home

The air above my parents’ roof is cold. 
It pushes smoke back down the chimney, 
forcing me to turn off the fire alarm 
and open both windows. 

Practicing at Sunrise

In the morning’s glissando, 
Canadian night wrapped tightly 
against opaque windows, 
she rises. The brick in her bed 

Natural Symmetry

The restaurant juts above the pond, 
casting lucent shadows in those moments 
that fall still between dinner and dark. 
Reflections luminesce against the faces 

Night Thunder at the Cabin

In thunder at 2 a.m. 
I occupy all my lives 
my loves hovering holding 
rising with me to the wild night 

Military Funeral in a High Hills Cemetery

An adulterous generation after all. 
We seek a sign, some old tune or rhyme 
Like Grandfather’s Clock, even as we stand
Among the tumbling chaos of death and birth

Day Music

The mountain is a redhead 
lying on his back 
nose and knees pointed 
to the sun. His hair 

Wild Things

I’ve heard of horses—mustangs mostly—who run wild across Nevada’s
bleak terrain. (They kind of remind me of Uncle Bill, who ran wild, too, last
summer, until Aunt Shirley caught up with him at the border). Horses know
no borders, don’t allow limits, except those imposed by a weariness of

Plain and Simple

It could have been an impossible day. 

And then the wind 
helping the Gardener’s Eden keep its promise:
the outdoor ornaments

Temple Square — Past and Present

Past 

Through iron gates shine 
Bronze doors never opened—Holiness to the Lord. 
Sun, moon, and stars live in granite, 
Carved by dead ancestors

Reclamation

The Oquirrh Mountains form a finger of land 
which rests its tip in the Great Salt Lake. Slopes 
behind alfalfa gently rise until they stop 
where the motion of ancient waves left benches of sand.

Grandma Comes for Me

Out of Sunday morning dark 
My grandma came for me. 

Stripped bare to dreaming I saw 
Her occupy the fat black leather rocker

Thin Ice

I watch two girls on wheels. 
Four neon-green wheels 
on each foot. Rollers 

Fertility

On your twelfth birthday, 
the day you found a kinship with the moon and tides,
you sat on the front steps as a great burlap ball
rolled in its place secured and shimmering— 
an olive tree. 

Naked

They’d come from practice at the gym, 
their hair steaming, 
and in the flirt and banter 
would reach inside my girlfriend’s car 

Hop Hornbeam

In the Sacred Grove 
near Palmyra, New York, 
there’s hardly a tree 
old enough to have been 

From Under Ground

From under ground 
you can hear them stomp, 
a chaotic cacophony 
amplified by mud and bone, 

Planting Day

Behind the weathered barn, I crouch 
among burlap bags full of this year’s 
seed. These kernels promise before 
they prove, and I have no choice 

Trajectory at the End of Winter

Back from a walk along the Big Wood River in early May 

I am the river alive with spring run-off 
one moment rushing to be where the calling calls, 
the next a pool reflecting or an eddy at play.

Russell

You’d been the one taken out and talked to during stories of Jesus.
On the scuffed pew you stuffed the blessed bread 
in your mouth and blew it out, laughing. 
So when they found you in blood at the foot of the stairs,

Jesus Lost

Do you know this picture, asks
the magazine. Yes, I’ve seen
this man before. I’m sure 
that clean, bronze brow, those
dark eyes’ intensity surprised

Through a Glass Darkly

In their projected restoration, contractors 
pulled down aging plywood, discreetly 
placed to hide remnants of the stained-glass 
window shattered in the fifties by a bevy 

Under the Faultline

The night before, the earth had jolted us, 
A ripple in our sleep till Dad called it 
A quake and brought to life the massive plates
Beneath us gnashing the ages. It was 

The Basic Tune of the Sparrow

Outside the glass that keeps us warm, 
the sparrows, 
most common of creatures, 
of whom the promise is made 

The Charity of Silence

This is the story of my father’s demise. It wanders when I tell it, and I never know when to bring in the polygamy, so I just do and let matters take care of themselves.…

The By-pass

If I looked up the road from the irrigation ditch, I could see the church house bumping stiff and dark against the sunset’s blaze. “The old church house/’ people called it now. “The old churchhouse,”…

Salt Lake Citations

A friend writes: In a walking excursion last fall through the old block lying between Fifth and Sixth East, Seventh and Eight South—in a narrow alley behind Charon’s Mexican Bakery—I came across a shop of…

Thin Ice

I watch two girls on wheels. 
Four neon-green wheels 
on each foot. Rollers 

Emma’s Anguish

Joseph, Joseph, 
            How has the night persuaded you? 
What bed but this? 
What arms but mine? 

Joseph to Emma

Out of the night of holy election, 
Out of the silence, the eloquent silence 
Only believing whispers to me: 
Follow the guiding of soul-felt selection, 

Winter Dies

The full third moon of passing 
winter rears up 
against an x-ray white orchard. 
There are tree skeletons. 

Indian Summer

If, when September rolls over in the gutter, 
picks himself up and stumbles off 
in search of a restroom, coffee and eggs, 
you pull back the drapes and slide open the window,
he will disregard the screen and make himself your guest. 

Pah Tempe

After another day hiking the desert,
I lock the door of my car,
and turn toward the hot springs
in the cool night.

Parched

Measured teaspoons of salt. 
Sifted flour, dustbowl flour. 
It gulps and swallows water. 
I feel it splinter off my hands, 

In Riverdale

We returned to our beginnings 
            in August, with its crayola green 
            trees and grass, blue sky, 
and yellow light so certainly imposed 

In a Pueblo Indian Dwelling, Four-Corners

            Beside 
shards of earthen jars and bowls, 
the Kachina-Child returns 
in the desert’s smoldering gaze. He enters 

Anhedonia

He said, “She said it means
Unable to have pleasure,
Unable to find it anywhere.
She put me on Zoloft to help.”

Learning to Disappear

They say there is a Buddha 
                        In each grain of sand 

We begin huge and rigid. Life grinds 
away at us. We grind against one another.

Sensing Spirits

We had to fly to her brother’s wedding. 
But she lay prone on a heating pad, 
the room spinning above, and her 
weight and blood pressure each 

An Act of Faith

Flat, oval galaxies float—indeterminately 
Distant yet distinct—above. . .glimmer and prepare
To fade into determinate darkness. 

Maps of Time

We inch forward on hearsay, 
rumors, and puffs of wind, 
working the ancient arts 
of dead reckoning, stars, 

Commonplace Nightmares

Most likely it was an act of God that 
the cathedral caught fire even before 
the hangman put the mask on my head 
and all my executioners ran in search of water 

History of the Church — Part One

I feel grace descend like whiskey-scented 
oil poured over me in the upper room on 
my way to heaven. I dance in the heat of 
a fire, like ghosts following Sitting Bull 

Coming Home

I see you in the glass. 
Welcome home! 
Hard to believe 
You are a man 

Love is a Delicate Chain

Here, the heavy brown ones from your father’s coat,
there the ladybugs from Jari’s first grade dress,
and from your birthday shirt, five urgent reds.
You, sorting the buttons while I sewed. 

Being World

I am invidious of mothers’ rubber air 
Connecting them to baby. How they walk 
With young on hip, the way the baby turns and

About my Conversion: Directions to a Nonbeliever

Run your finger across the arc of my cheekbone.
Notice how it curves like the hull of Noah’s ark
that propelled life through earth’s watery death. 

Forever Family

Five of his and four of hers were 
step-this-and-that to each other. 

The Church said, “Families Are 
‘Forever'”—in their case it was more

Plenty: A Morning Poem at 75

You do not have to do it again 
any of it. Only if you care to. 

You do not have to hold onto being anyone, anywhere.
Enough is more than plenty.

Spiritualizing the Organic

The garden heaves with what does not belong—
plastics, agent orange, rubber cement, land mines
that won’t biodegrade, disintegrating corpse
bones, sanded into earth by worms 

In the Kitchen on a Saturday Morning

Three men 
in a circumference of scant sentences, 
slow dull sounds 
trade expertise, 

Lament for My Eyes in a Mirror

I am Ron involved in me now Norma’s gone. 
Norma knew me more than my mind only. 
I know me only in eyes gone dead as mirrors. 
More than I Norma knew me in my eyes. 

The Handing

—for Beth Rich 

She was seventy-one, moving on. Her five-foot-two 
leukemia-lessened to eighty pounds, only 
her hands the same, large, fanned storehouse of comfort, her
vitaligo, the brown pattern of taking on 
the sun to map the journeys:

Proud Flesh

Dad doctors Rudy’s leg, 
torn and jagged 
just above the hoof 
enmeshed in barbed wire. 

The Rose Jar

Musky as the cedar drawer 
in Grandmas’ standing metal trunk, 

a genie scent, improbable and 
distant as the sound of hooves on sand

Out in the Shop: In Memory of Grandpa

The sun shines a triangle through the hazed glass 
of the shop door, spotlighting the eternal snow of dust
falling and collecting, as if by magnetic force, 
on drill bits, saw blades, and boxes of nails. 

Encounter

Absently, I opened the medicine cabinet 
in my folks’ house (searching for a comb), 
then stood stunned as you wafted out 
like a genie, so generous with cologne 

Balsamic Vinegar

I didn’t go for vinegar
but for the smell of life
for organic tomatoes
not mall tomatoes of feldspar
or other inorganic stuff

Wedding Vows

My fears awakened 
when I touched you, sacrificial, 
kneeling at the altar 
extending your hands, 
beckoning to be destroyed 
ceremoniously. 

Without Question

Did you ever start to think 
what happens to saliva while you sleep? 
Don’t. 

Eve’s Psalm

My fingers, like God’s fingers, 
point to the dawn of salvation. 
I clasp this pomegranate, its seeds like 
worlds extending our isolated existence. 

Aspiration

Wind, shorn from the sky by glass 
and concrete, whistles down the face
of the casino tower, flings the naked
branches of a sidewalk tree, and pours

Sestina of the Martyrdom

On the long tether of a day in June 
Beyond the Zion swamps, the prisoned palms
Of four men opened toward a promised land.
And yet, below the shadows of limestone 
Joseph thought again, I am going 
Like a lamb to the slaughter. 

On a Morning After New Snow and a Winter of Healing Inside

Out there in the yard 
            winter drips silver 
            and bombardiers through branches its excesses 
                        of yesterday. White. 

The Passing Lane

Through the glow 
of dashboard lights 
reflected in the glass, 
I watch a plow drop its blade 
and scrape the ice, 
knicking the blacktop. 

Miracle of Wood

—that wood could come in 
that thin and blonde 
for kindling 
after the dark bark, 
after the ax whack 
and the crack 
of white opening, 
the stria of wood 
gouging, indenting 
my armloaded skin 

Christmas Card from Siple Station, Antarctica

Awake all night where no night conies 
she trasmits waves into the sky 
from sixty feet beneath snow. 
Some arc into the solar winds 

Syllabus

Astronomy
The earth
Or sky wobbles,
We don’t know which

Remuneration

The price is higher than he expects 
he smiles, wondering if it 
has something to do with the new 
black fishnets 

Water Will

In that first summer before a town was 
(Only tents and wagonbeds), they tossed
Pails of water over the sun-scorched canvas. 

Trouble in Eternity

The trouble is in eternity, the Angels say, 
Where my Mormon husband twenty years
Divorced believes in his sleep that we 
Are married still. Always he is sleeping 

Nobody’s Grandpa

He paid the three-twenty 
three and slipped the familiar 
red and white box into 
his jacket pocket. 

The Empty Cistern

Silence and grace, 
the only words I know 
in either of their languages, 
so I don’t say much. 

Disrobed

The moment that I cannot comprehend 
is when you took your garments off. 

I wonder (though I don’t quite want to know) 
whether, when the moment came, 
it was conscious or was incidental.

I Add Craig to My Prayers

All bones, nose, and trouble. 
It hasn’t been a year 
since he burned the tool shed down 
then crouched, crying, at the back 
of the garden while firemen watered 
the high whipping flames. 

Gardner’s Song

The tomb was a mouth 
that knew one note: grief. 
The rock lips opened, 
closed: tight as a safe. 

Red’s Tire Barn Titans

They are overmatched from the beginning. 
Even the black block numbers on their backs
seem to loom on the jerseys that hang slack 
and flap about their narrow bodies, smooth

Archaeopteryx

Quarry workmen slice open the past,
pry limestone chunks with picks, 
shave each delicate layer 
with a chisel and a sledge. 

Night Light

With a neighbor who couldn’t tolerate light, 
I took stairs in the dark, 
felt for knobs and shapes 
of cabinets in windowless rooms. At home, 

Childhood Homes

“A crackerbox,” my mother called it, 
            Her marriage’s first scene. 
My first home, my brother’s, tucked 
            Far back for remembering, 
The place where she dyed feedsacks 
            To curtain the windowscreens. 

Vicarious

For and in behalf of those dead 
before God’s love could smother 
them. I enter the font and take a baptism. 
Buried in the temple’s basement, twelve 
garlanded oxen balance the precarious 

Liahona

After he was let go, Dad’s job 
was changing the rolls on those 
little spindles in the bathrooms. 

Christian Spinning

My son who is blue-eyed and sensitive
thinks he’s alone in his room 
where his music bumps and heaves. 
I stand unseen at the door which is open

Listening to the Lord

A rare treat in Manila—real grass, 
short and green, probing tentatively 
out of rich soil. The sky 
waits to rain—black clouds 

Breach Birth: Aug. 20, 1891

He is born breach, meaning gap. 
From the beginning 
he was negative space 
a blue cast shadow, 

Utah Territory, 1893

A washed cup, 
folded socks, 
three unworn shirts 
with no scent of him. 
Smooth bedsheets, 
dry towels. 

Delineation

October snow brings the hunters 
down from the mountains 
without their kill. Sometimes 
it happens this way. Sumac and oak 

Alive in Mormon Poetry

The summer 2002 edition of Irreanteum: Exploring Mormon Literature is de voted to the theme of environmental writing in LDS theology and culture. It features poems solicited by guest editor Todd Petersen by several contemporary…

Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture

When the above notice appeared in the Improvement Era in September 1933, it did not seem out of place in a publication intended for the general church membership. In the same issue of the Improvement Era, Theodore E. Curtis posted a notice for another collection of poetry. Its announcement included endorsements from notable leaders of the church: 

The Woman of Christlike Love

Into her brownies she sifts sunshine 
into a day she irons the clear scent of giving. 

Almost Pentecostal

Mrs. Robinson sang in the choir. 
            In the church, my face, my husband’s, 
            and one other white couple on the stage. 

A Motherless House

I live in a Motherless house,
A broken home. 
How it happened I cannot learn. 

The Middle Path, Colorized

The usual iconography failed me. 
My mother thumb-tacked 
a cardboard print above my crib; 
my age of reason came early. 

We Were Not Consulted

We couldn’t say 
            the yes that would loosen 
                        our grip, tutoring us 
            in doing without. 
Some things were simply snatched away. 

The Right Place

Not one has made it. 
Trout launch out of Snake Creek, 
flipping through the air, 
vaulting up the waterfall, 

Night Work Near Escalante

After dawn we hike through fine rain, 
but the light is good, only slight 
cellophane distortion as we look through 
at trees and stream, box canyon walls 

You Owe Me

There’s a foul wind blowing in from ten o’clock
Saying, You owe me. I check my balance books,
And they don’t look off, but the wind insists,
You owe me. What? I ask. You abandoned me. 

Antler People v. Womb People

The antler people have ways of finding 
The womb people’s poles and knocking 
Them to the ground, if only in the mind. 
The womb people bare their breasts 

Contralto

In the interval after the mastectomy 
before her head was a slick white egg, 
she would color the gray roots of her dark 
blanket-soft hair with drugstore dye. 

The Mothers’ Antlers

The mothers have antlers of their own, the eldest 
Mother shall lead the rest, show them 
How to do with food first of all, house is next, 
And training young the last. The Mothers train 

Inheritance

I wear her name 
and a two carat diamond 
which, like a heavy rock of salt, 
falls to the side between my fingers. 
I’m sitting on a pink velvet chair 

Nothing We Needed to Know

And then, to show how it was done, 
Mrs. Jackson, the Home Ec. teacher, 
bent from the waist, the way you drink from a tap,
and demonstrated how to let the breasts 

Cargoes II

Tanker from al-Kuwayt on the Persian Gulf 
Passes the Straits of Hormuz (which Americans hold), 
With a cargo of “black gold”— 
Gas and petroleum— 
For further refinement in Galveston. 

War Bride

She pictures heavy boots, plodding through sand, 
and wonders if the socks she knitted fit him. 
In sundown-smoky Baghdad, her Marine digs trenches, 
longing for double beds and salt-rimmed tequilas, 

The Cedars of Lebanon

Across a shattered street, a Muslim groom lifts 
the train of his Christian bride as he steps over 
broken glass, old tires, and miles of rubblestone. 
Her face, a dark rose, is the only beauty 
in this ravaged landscape. 

Aladdin’s Lamp, March 4, 2003: on the eve of first strike in Iraq

Out of a dream 
a fragrance overwhelms me: 
not saffron, not lavender 
but something in between: 

Movement: Out of Doors, Out of Town, In Dangerous Times

To that lit spot ahead 
is as far as you’ll walk: 
open green, bounded by pale shrubs 
you can’t name, sky 
in clabbery cloud, light blue showing through. 
Storm coming, your father would say. 

Gene, My Eternal Brother*

Speak now in the voice of peace. 
The poets of the world are rising, 
rising against the storm. 
Speak in your poet’s voice, 

Blind Tears

From that first dark day 
the Khmer Rouge, 
a scourge of scarlet locusts, 

Heart Mountain

At the Japanese American National Museum
a pile of small stones, most 
no bigger than my thumb, each 
with a single kanji, 

Resurrection

What if the Resurrection were not pent 
for the vast reendowment of all flesh 
but occurred as if by chance, like birth 
(that miraculous appointment), and just 
as unnoticed. What if these were the terms?: 

Yahrzeit

This morning I light red candles 
and set them on the sill, 
daring the breeze 
through an open window 
to tease the flames. 

The Meadow

My family and I drove hours one Sunday to see 
a meadow in the mountains of Arizona. We stood 
behind a split-rail fence. “It’s beautiful,” 
my dad said. “It’s for sale. If we had money 
we’d buy it.” And we climbed the fence 
and wandered that acre of wildflowers and ferns, 
ate fried chicken and picked up our litter, 
and went home. 

Eve’s Offering

Sacred, subtle slavery, the mother’s task 
That burden of creation’s holy power. 
To love a clot of flesh and never ask 
If it deserves its soul at chosen hour. 

Afield

Just off the highway 
in the setting sun 
cattle gather on a hill. 
My foot lets up 

Death to the Death of Poetry! The Art Is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

When I read Robert Hughes’s essay, “Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture,” published in a recent Dialogue,[1] I didn’t feel an overwhelming need to respond. But like a sliver that goes at first unnoticed and later…

November 2001

You notice the smells first, more spring, or
even summer, than late fall, the stale-clean
scent of wet sunlit streets after last night’s 
heavy rain, the musk of soaked dead leaves,

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1999

Soft summer wind lifts girls’ sheer dresses into wings,
Pinks, reds, and golds winking and rippling through the air
Like babies cooing far away. 
They pose round-faced and porcelain 

The Riverbank, Late Winter: Living North

A lined calendar of empty trees 
turns the cold 
consolable. Even light this dim 
is an invitation. 

The Fall of My Fiftieth Year

Winter already edging down 
from mountain passes, I walk past 
our first town cemetery, filled with upright 
markers and gold-red trees. 
It’s had no vacancies for years. 

Eighteen Thousand Sundowns

Near a rock slope of hill pasture, 
grass grows up through a few old bones. 
Again, what’s moved past recall 
is not past pain. White as the noon-day 

Reading into Dusk

On the wood porch I awake 
to no sound, but a sense of some change: 
light falls across an arm and 
I pull back into darkness. 

#939: Ambulance Unit

‘Say goodbye to all 
this bluddled nonsense on earth: 
simple rot inside 
a coffin’s a better life. 
I’m now more trouble than I’m 

#1071: The Banality of Evil

Had I been a German in those Thirties, 
I should have joined the Party: 
I should have gone with the rest. 
I should have condoned the persecution of the Jews. 

Prayer for a Grandchild

Let bells come 
            from porches and throats 
of brown cows, 

Baptism

The old man bent and balding 
is lowered into the water. 
At that small moment of burial 
he remembers his mother, thinks 

El Cordero de Dios

Driving from Hollister to Santa Cruz late morning, I
stop at San Juan Bautista to grab a sandwich. 
All the signs point toward the Mission, so I keep driving.
Brown-skinned Mexican kids swirl around the plaza

A Spinster Physician Weeps While Speaking Her Sermon on Abstinence: A Sonnet without Rhyme

In her fiftieth year and all these other 
smug and satisfied people’s children 
gaping faces from the pews like ripe pears 
and what can she say—a professional woman, 

Triptych-History of the Church

I feel grace descend like whiskey-scented 
oil poured over me in the upper room on 
my way to heaven. I dance in the heat of 
a fire, like ghosts following Sitting Bull 

Martin in Me

Three times I take his words into my mouth 
and make them thunder from my tongue. 
His final speech will not remain unsung in me. 

Confession

The trees wear 
            copper-lit skin tonight. 
Spread out and still in the cold, 
they look like slender Kenyans 
                        holding up thousands of hands, 

Thousand Springs

It snowed yesterday for a moment
            but it was an idea 
                        that didn’t catch on — 

Sorrow and Song

That morning you came to me 
I saw the lamp arising in your beard, 
a flash of solder and fire 
wisping in your robes and hair 

Women in a Time Warp | Sheree Maxwell Bench and Susan Elizabeth Howe, eds., Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women

Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women is a slim publication attempting to represent two hundred years of poetry by Mormon women. The anthology is divided into sections that portray the stages of a…

Salad for Two

I sense someone beside me 
and see Emily’s eyes on my hands 
and the knife in the sink. 
She asks, What are you slicing? 

The Good Shepherd

If I were the neighborhood bishop 
There’d be lots of things I couldn’t really help with
No rolling up sleeves to fix Brother Nielsen’s car
No driving some new tractor to plow snow 

The Peach

Blake’s angel, for all his winks and nods,
Wouldn’t have it, though it hangs for having:
Drop of down and blush quavering on the rim
Of ripeness, playing at a fall. 

Family Tree

Adam: The wind hissed in the branches, 
green tongues 
whispering 
a secret I could 
never peel open. 

Faith Healing

And there she was, Kathryn Kuhlman* strolling the stage at the Civic,
parting a sea of applause, her gown like an angel that got away,
so pure it might have been empty but for the Holy Ghost preening
in her body as she paced the floral proscenium, lifting her hands
in a sign language I knew only God understood. 

Churchgoers

My brother dumps raw
sugar into his 
mouth from a small 
plastic tube he hides 

The Orchid Grower

He sought to grow rare orchids up bright air 
On theory they were closer to the sun. 
Such trailing gardens of the blue compare 
To virga with refractions overrun. 

Triple A’s

He himself is the present he is wrapping 
under the starlit branches of the sky. 
This, of course, is a truth that needs no trapping: 
it is apparent to the naked eye. 

The Elect

The righteous pagans cursed our easy grace.
We shrugged and smiled and knew salvation well.
Looking our wounded savior in the face,
the righteous pagans cursed our easy grace.

Scriptum Est

He read us stories from a book as blank
as a white sky. (He couldn’t read the sky,
however.) Words marched forward, rank on rank:
he read us stories from a book as blank

My Brother’s Bed

To wake up remembering his empty bed 
is serene as touching the walls of a cave, 
is to believe you can keep that Friday in mind 
and heft Galilee on your back. 

My Brother Was Buried Wearing a Red Jacket

Walking up to the coffin 
(a little larger than a viola case), 
I see his jacket lying stiff 
as baseball card gum. 

Brooklyn: City of Churches

At the OTB, men “cross” themselves 
as their horses race across TV screens 
double-checking their stubs 
before dropping them on the floor 

Old Rodeo Man

The ground is an absolute, the air lets 
you down. The way you leave your bronc sustains 
a conspiracy of violence you embrace 
the way you mean an oath. Forever. 

Carol Took the Call

Al had tethered me to the class of 53, 
webbed me to classmates before the web, 
invited me back every ten years. 

Everlasting

Every bride asks herself, What if 
he doesn’t show up? What then? 

Bliss

I trace my past life through hairdos: ringlets, 
pigtails, finger waves, straightened-on-juice-cans,
bouffant, French braids, and—worst—sausage rolls
flying back from my face like ditsy, exuberant wings. 

The Holding Room

In a plowed field at the rim 
of the southern Utah desert 
one of those Schnebbley brothers 

Guest Room

Our children were conceived 
            in a carved maple bed sent 
from Milwaukee on the train 
            by my husband’s grandmother in 1937. 

Sheep Ranch Near Hillspring

She never speaks to him anymore. Her tongue
is as bone-dry as an irrigation ditch in winter, 
her ankles grimy as a crooked ewe’s. Dribbled 
wine and spots of sour milk stain her blouse, 
and now his lead sheep has given up the bell. 

On Reading a Blank Page

I once sat on a plateau’s edge 
It began on my back, with updrafts. 
They rose along the white escarpment 

Jonah in the Belly

So this is how you’ll preserve 
me, Lord? in a slosh of brine? 
Go ahead, though I’ve borne no fruit, torn 
loose from my roots and gone my own way. 

Christmas Carol (Post-Christmas: 2005)

As though he were sculpted there, so still
is the only Shama thrush of the winter
dripping melody among dropping needles
high in this raining forest of ironwoods 

Washing Mother

I return for the washing. 
Can’t resist your need, 
Or else I want to atone 
For leaving so eagerly 
Without glancing back, 
Back when you were whole and lively
And wanting to hold me tight. 

Tonkas

the real M.A.S.H fiction 
forests colonials raped 
harsh llbon-nohm-dil 
Hankuk and Chosun were bald 
all native trees Japan burned 

Fruit

First 
“She’s like an apple 
in a water balloon,” 
the doctor says. They watch 

Orisons

Raw-tipped branches
freeze and unflutter.
Chafed knuckles wince
to bud wadeable leaves,
homesick mulch. 

Mouths

We’ve left your mother to sleep alone,
no mouth or hand at breast, 
free to dream and sleep alone 

Summer Dam

After spring snowmelt from Ephraim Canyon 
where Grandpa ran his eighty head in summer, 
the creek slowed and eased its crippled way 
down over gravel and stones, 

Upon the Face of the Water

The chokecherry where we camped one June 
hung low over the water, sheltering 
brown shade beneath its branches 
so clear the water revealed crooks in our legs 

Reflections on Darkness and Light

All that has gone before makes the now, somehow.
Whys are sucked deep into the darkened spirit’s
black hole where desperate reaching retrieves 
distraught questions from God’s battered children.
Response comes in increments, 
not yes or no, butmaybe, no matter, not yet. 

Where Are the Horses?

I have awakened him from a deep sleep 
slumped over in his blue vinyl and chrome wheelchair 

and wrenched him from a scene 
of young riders and sweating horses

Compass

In the simmer and slow furnace 
of morning, the ball sits on the ground 
rotund as pomegranate, a misshapen 

Graduation

As morning breaks, our daughter, 
wearing her best blue dress, is too excited to eat. 
The wasted Cheerios bob like buoys in her bowl. 

poetry on the ‘fridge door

my mother is madly licking 
at the languid red peach, 
screaming at life and 
the rust crush of death. 

Showshoe Song

flung unsifted from bluest above 
snow casts light on me in sparks 
Behold all ye that kindle fire 
That compass yourselves about with sparks 

Borax

The sand that blows along the bed 
of the Amargosa waves and shirrs 
and cleans as well as water. It scours 
the tatters left uneaten by birds, 

Dining with the Devil | R. A. Christmas, A Long Spoon: Poems

Over the past forty years, Robert Christmas has been one of the best and most consistent poets writing about Mormon life and culture. His distinctive style and voice are readily recognizable. What makes Christmas’s poetry…

Quantum Gospel: A Mormon Testimony

Symmetry exists in exact reflections of Love: 
Take a patch of chaos circling beforehand, 
Sling it past black stars circling at random, 
Create light in rings inside particled sparks, 
Glowing in random points and recognitions, 
Moving and brewing beneath your own hand.
Respond to Word of God inside your mind: 
Call the involvement creation, as the eyes 
Of the Gods gaze infinity into finite forms. 

At the End of the Street Lies the Sky

At the end of the street lies the sky 
dressed in the purple magician’s robe 
of eventide and the winter storm. 
Tonight she sculpts stairs of ice and 

Sonnet to Japanese Spring

Spring has come to old Nippon! 
Standing on a hill I see 
Verdant valleys neatly sown, 
Stepped and terraced, and a bee 

Black Handkerchief

Lying on the table, 
he was as handsome 
as the day he had taken her 
through the veil. 

Wedding Flower

Her body was cold, nearly 
frigid in the room 
set aside for such matters. 

After My Brother’s Remission

When dawn comes this early, 
a slice of sky visible from my bed 
textures waking. Today’s thin layers clabber 
white . . .

Some with Shadows

A day of long-walked silences, 
waterless red gullies and hard-rock 
plateaus. We’ve met few on the trails 
this summer past my father’s dying. 

While Planting Hollyhocks

In the dim green 
I can’t tell what I’m remembering, 
or what’s been handed down. . . .

Yorick

A cold spell 
for my desecration 
slipped upward from your grave. 

The Clearing

Spring again. 
The browns, the ochre, 
the brittle death of fall and winter 
recast in transcendent greens— 
            vibrant, transparent, resurgent. 

I Teach Six-Year-Olds about Jesus in Sunday School

A girl I’ve never met meets me at the door, 
whines at my leg until I hold her. Thin arms, 
thin mouth, a sour smell I overlook while fetching 
crayons, glue sticks, snacks. She lifts her dress, 
exposes the top of her baggy white tights, looks at me.
We both sing: “Faith is knowing the sun will rise…”
I sit next to her, tap her hands, whisper no. 

Hunter’s Visitation

Most of my life I’ve believed what these eyes see 
these hands can touch, 
that seeing and touching—being touched— 
ends when they nail the coffin lid on. 

Nephews

Their shovels grate rock and gravel to fill 
the grave she’d scoff empty of their grief— 
“Hey, guys, I’m with God!” she’d proclaim. 
“I’m not here, guys! I’m with Jeeeeezus, singing!”

Patriarchal Blessing

The boy, sixteen, is taller than his mother, taller than
the creaky man with shining eyes and trembling hands. 

To My Teacher

You light between tall trees, never trip 
on roots—and yet leave heavy footprints. 
Bounding toward the surf, you pause for me: 
together we will touch the sacred. 

Moving the Story, with Conviction: On the LDS Church and the Marriage Amendment

For them, 
there was no between 
they believed the tale 
and trekked to testify 
and walked and walked 

Land’s End 1997

The wind is simple 
a thing with pacific bite. 
Lifting foam tatters, cold. 

The Word

The Word was made Flesh 
and the Flesh made Words. 
He fed the Five Thousand 
on words shaped like loaves 

One Tree

Outside my window 
one lone dead tree 
is standing firm 
in brave desiccation 

Spring Variations on a Theme by Lorenzo Snow

As man, is God—once. 
Was—as God is man— 

Mechanical Failures

The old man shimminates and coughs 
along the shoulder of the road 
and veers like the wobble in the wheel 
that brought his Airstream to a stop. 

Three-Legged Dog

An old three-legged dog, 
whiskers whitening, coat black 
as the carbon of a starless winter night, 
slowly hobbyhorses along 
the cobblestone street near the 
park green and water blue of 
Gradina Cismgiu in graying Bucharest. 

A Proposal

When your snow melts, 
pick a late spring day, 
and wear your Levis. 

City of Brotherly Love

On the hottest of days 
in the sweltering summer of Philadelphia— 
when city streets sizzled like bacon with 
paved heat and the smothered air 

Beautiful Black Madonna of Czestochowa

They journey with hope 
of a blessing, a healing, a miracle of sorts 
for they have heard the stories told 
of old. 

Caught Up

John the Beloved considers the Rapture 

Word buckler, chary tribe, 
inured lamb,

Epithalamium

Good advice was of no use in the garden, 
reason only rudimentary in her 
who slouched toward the tree and took unflinching 
what was needed. 

Fidelity to Objects

The ponderous round oak table 
calls our family of ten 
to their places, 
the crowns of our heads 
like small planets 
stilled in orbit, 
mealtime settings like jewels 
in an expansive medallion. 

Necktie

Again he stands 
at the mirror 
and wants to jump 
into the waterfall 

Grace

I’m wedged between two lifetimes,
this one and that.
Like cement walls on either side,
they press close.

The Local Police Report

At sixteen, I’m listening 
to the sounds of a fractured frame house: 

my older sister sobbing 
over hard news 
about a religious leader she has long admired,

Jesus Was There

on the wall behind the choir chairs, 
and the ladies 
brushing the warm chapel air 
with round cardboard fans were there, 

Always with Us

Years later, at a high school reunion, 
a girl gave a tribute to a classmate who had died. 
Not knowing another way to end 
her remarks, she did so 
“in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” 

Curious

Curious it is 
the simple means employed by God 
to bring great things to pass. 

Change

It’s coming on fall, 
time for a change, whispers the wind through the leaves. 

Man, dust

My holes remained whole 
at your arrival. 
I stood there, watching, impotent— 
cut the purple Nike rope, 

Multi-level Marketing

You may not appreciate this but 
I once ran into Hugh Nibley— 
at Smith’s market in Provo— 
you know, the guy who wrote all 

Glaucus

We can’t say what Glaucus knew 
From watching storms crush and reshape 
The surge, what voices he’d heard 
When the tide swelled onto the beach, 

One Tree Redux

Pierce the Veil

Salt Lake City Cemetary: Jewish Section

White Rain (forty years since our meeting)

Flying Out

What Rocks Know

Sober Child

Neshutan

A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal

Abba: The Name of God

Etching

On Losing My Cell Phone

Oceanography

Relinquishing

Gentle Dad

Self-Portrait as Burnt Offering

A Perfect World

The Man with One Foot Outside of Hell

Handmaid

Our First Home Has Forgotten Us

Contingency #4: White Out

From Outside the Settlement

Untitled

Sheets

the god of small things

Things Missed

Time Being

In this Version of Autumn

Sisyphus

Ripple Rock

The Leg

Internal Affairs

Blue Glass

Abracadabra

Bum Bam Boom

Flannel Board

Turncoat

Romance

An Apocalypse

Accidental Mystic

Marginalia

Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother

Mother Willow

Winterscape: Prairie

Seasonal Ritual

Easter Sermons

Gaius

Dishes

Intermission Wine

Sex Talk Sunday

Listening to My Parents Through the Ventilator Shaft

Blessing My Son

Vitae

Visible from Here

Dark Energy

Four Passes on Mount Horeb

Good Government in the City

Nazarín

San Diego Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints

The Afternoon Hour

Atlanta to Salt Lake

Revelation

After Her Stroke

Finding Place

Runaway

Mass Transit Madonna

Perplexed by the Revelator’s Heaven

Review: Tyler Chadwick, ed. Fire in the Pasture 21st-Century Mormon Poems

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference: Savior, silver, psalms, and sighs, and flash-burn offerings

“Epithalamion” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Fern Hill Revisited

Janie Goodmansen’s Reply

Sixth-Grade Broadway Revue

Inaccuracy

Hobble Creek Almanac

Graphene

A Short Poem about Nearly Everything

In Those Days of My Spirit: A Found Poem

Same-Sex Attraction

Blessed Virgin

This Dock My Home

Fractals

Ghazal

The Feather Pen

Glazier

Offerings

Singing in the Easter Choir beside My Enemy

Puzzled

Emptying Pockets

Beyond (on the Beach)

The Hosanna Shout

Sabbath Baptism

Melancholia

Easter

Trying to Keep Quiet: A Poem Constructed Around Fragments of Leslie Norris’s “Borders”

IRRELEVANT—RELEVANT

For Margene

About Half

evidence of things not seen

Jungle Walks

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Shade

Evenings in October

Not Far Off Trail, Late Summer

Crow Games

Haiku for the Cat

Blood Cries

Oblation

Faith

Let Rocks Their Silence Break

Review: When Good is Better than Great: Susan Elizabeth Howe’s Salt Susan Elizabeth Howe. Salt: Poems

Review: Job: A Useful Reading Michael Austin. Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poems

flicker

with gratitude to Adam S. Miller and Ryan W. Quinn in the beginning, Godgave grace awayfast and free to all this is what we call creationwhich was actually continuationand still continues every day, every hour,…

Noted in the Dark

Some nights here there’ve been singings      the children out into twilight . . . their countings,their hidings, their      ally ally oxen frees.And sometimes the crickets were not sounding bereft      but offered impressions you needed to hear. Now in…

These Are the Hours

when birds disappear taking strips of light      folded in feathersnight insects ready themselves      for meals from leaves of rose and raspberrythe hollow by the lane      pools with evening like waterno moonrise cool radiance      but night…

Vantage: Hoback Rim to Wind River

Closed to drift most of the year,trails descend through short lives of wildflowersbright in colonies, August air verging on frost,its thin metallic edge:snow squalls visible aheadwhere a continent divides.Life stays steep. Nothing in the view…

The Days Between—After Leaving Our YoungestAt College

It’s turning fall in this long alley of young trees,poplar leaves still and golding in deep shade.You see no one and hear not even birds. But the pale trunks together seem to humlike choir rows,…

Lithium Shuffle

Down the streettrusties from the state hospitalfollowing the horizon of their noon shadows,their feet scooping up the sidewalk,the fastest as slow as the slowest.The sun is on them and pitiless.If we, shaded neighborson the other…

heavy seeds

. . . they buried the weapons of war, for peace. Alma 24:19 bury seeds these      with covenant gritshrill songs on our lips      as we circle the pit clank seeds clanging      as we cry-file bybeg,…

Homemade Medicine

Grandpa filled gelcaps with his own mixof dried herbs. Before clean food,before expensive organics, beforewellness became photogenic,he was a health nut. I asked himwhy did he grind dried leavesthe color of new hay,why did he…

Heart Sutra (In the guest bedroom at dawn, after the pandemic)

1Today we scorn Russians,But we were invaders, too.Our lifestyle at stake in Iraq.Searching but not finding.Blood and bones and dirt.Infection and tears.Fighting to prove . . . what?Truth? America? God on our side? Twenty years ago, I heard…

No Man Can Serve Two Masters

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. But my diagnosis says otherwise.  Depression oozes under my door:  the destroying angel visits:until I can’t get out of bed.  One week later I’m waving bloody hyssop  like glow sticks at a ravenudging sushi…

Throwing Up in the DC Temple

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Maybe it was envy  that churned inside meas I looked around the room. Wonderingwhat healthy Mormons felt  instead of fear.   My body forced  everyone  to consider  what it meant to be sick in…

Passion

“And he said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God?”—1 Nephi 11:16 A body so light, it floatedacross wind-whipped wavesand did not sink. So full of life,it survived empty forty days,no wheat for forty…

Fierce Passage

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Today while researching ancestors, sifting through nested petalsof records for names that belong to me, peoplewho’ve left their bloody signatures in my genes, I found Melissa, some sixth…

A Good Sick Girl Never Gives Up

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. A good sick girl would never give up.She pushes on in search of a cure,working as if all depended on her.“Not knowing beforehand” what she should do,she moves…

Hippocrates

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. The doctor calls her sweetheart when she criesat hearing there is nothing he can find.He pats her back but will not meet her eyes. He doesn’t really mean…

Migraine Suite

Enjoy this poem in audio version here. Prelude Something is not right.      A haunting quaver to the world. Your mind  feels viscous, your body      watery. The lights have dimmed. The sense      of the smell  of ozone. AllemandeA greasy fingerprint on…

Thanksgiving in Kindergarten: Salt Lake City, Utah, 1996

We grew up in a city named for water we could not drink.Our ancestors walked for miles to finda home that would not burn so easily,then stumbled on salt, which meant preservation. In 1996 we…

Mormon Tea

I.They leftDenmark’s ripening wheat fields,crossed moss-covered pathsof England and Wales, forsookthe saturated airof Tennessee to build homeson ground glazed in the open-air kilnof the western sun.Called by God,they did not think to askfirst peoples for…

Collect for a Family Friend Killed in a Sabbath Morning House Fire

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. O, preening angels, voyeursof bright and burning things, of underbuilding flare-ups andflaming caved-in tinder, whose breathing—plumed, infernal,unforgiving—sweltered her last daybreak with unholy invocation—Please, if mercy be,…

Earthen Lavers Tyler Chadwick, Litany with WingsScott Hales, Hemingway in Paradiseand Other Mormon PoemsElizabeth Pinborough, The Brain’s Lectionary:Psalms and Observations

A few years ago, William Logan wrote, “Poetry has long been a major art with a minor audience.”[1] We could more accurately call it a major art with many minor audiences grouped, like the poets,…

My Body in the Temple

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. Halfway through the session, I become awareof a full bladder and nothing else.All that is holy is eclipsedby flesh. I pant in claustrophobiabetween the lady who…

Like a Prayer—Phormium tenax

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. How that late sabbath afternoon you sat cross-legged on their lawn, Elder S at your side, the couple just across, their backs to her late summer…

anamnesis: confronting God in the flesh

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. 1. a patient’s accountof medical history,a reiteration of conditionscontracted by mortality,a form of proud flesh’sgranulation over a wound,a raised tissue massdelineating impact to sayhere is pain,…

Osmond Ward Chapel, Now Demolished

Sometimes from the thresholdof these doorswe are greeted by another self,another worldwe wish to worship, incarnationthe tithe we offerfor such a crossing: we, seeking the divine,the divine leaning toward us,fading coal of memory igniting into…

Portrait of Agnes

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. Stern little lady,ancestor in an oval frame,I like the way your shoulders slopeand your fingers dangleover the book and the carpetbag skirt.I like the way your…

Cemetery Walk

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. It was somewhere around here, I think.Where they buried that baby,yeah, the one I told you about.No, not by the pioneer obelisksa wife for each sidefresh…

The Garden I Know

Listen the Out Loud version of this poem here. In his artistic agony,diamond drops of bloodcovered Christ’s chiseled body,sacred sweat shimmeredin the light of the Passover moon.The Son of God, an altarpiece,in serene pain and…

Third Place: Penitent Magdalene, Donatello

Shock of agingin a wooden sculpture—more than yearsdisplayed here,her gauntand weathered faceportraying time had its way—sunken eyes,broken teeth,parched and haggard lips. The cathedralof her handsforms a gothic archbelow her chinsuggesting prayer,her frail body embracedby heavy…

First Place: His Own Hand

I desire to be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.—Theologica Germanica i. What the Right Hand Is Take my right hand—the index finger crookedfrom a long-forgotten break; the dintwhere…

Second Place: Our Lady of Innumerable Appellatives

Listen to the Out Loud version of the poem here. Enter into Her gates with thanksgivingand into Her courts with praise.—Psalm 100:4 1.Swirl of gold gleaming in our daughters’ eyes.Amen. Whorl of cirrostratus haloingthe moon.…

Saint George, Utah

Listen to the audio version here. Not named for the Saintwho met the princess bythe lake and with her girdleleashed the dragon. Who killed it for the people’s conversion.Whose chapel in Windsorholds a part of…

Bear One Another’s Burdens

Getting there

Paper Route

Podcast version of this piece. Sabbath afternoon in summer sometimes feelslike those February mornings I’d wedge thedamp butt of each newspaper in friend’s saddlepack clouded gray with his indistinguishablefingerprints. Their buckling mouths a smudgedbouquet of…

From the Angels’ Perch at Mount Moriah

Podcast version of this piece. Scene: Thicket for a Slaughter We have seenbets, contests— only the greatones sent tospar with God: father, son,sacrifice. Scene: An Examination Question:the brain, a tangledbramble—the fire and the knife,a fearsomebinding.…

Recreating Abraham’s Star Charts

Podcast version of this piece. I pause on the path, drop my sticks,and bend to read them like runes.Tell the stars, They said. So I do daily— I chart their breathless turning asI gather berries…

Addendum to Jacob Sorensen’s Patriarchal Blessing

Podcast version of this piece. I don’t know, Jake,why Dad asked me to drive you there,but I did hear every word Brother Allen said,and here’s a few he skipped: Our Heavenly Fatheris pleased with your…

Ministry of angles

Podcast version of this piece. You who more than oncespelled angle when meaning angel,are now one—maybe both.A sharp line on white paperdriving hardand fastin another spacewhose numbersI do not know. YetIn the arithmeticof our individual…

Morning Light

Podcast version of this piece. That dark matter that fashioned us, days laterMade light by command, what voice, I wonderCould shake atoms into place and stir invisibleWaves through the air, as something we cannot seeAllows…

Tender Rills

Podcast version of this piece. If Gods are poeming Kolob,if I am poeming God, if we arepoems to each other, A word is more than a destinationthan a path, than a map. A word is…

Prism

Podcast version of this piece. They had agreedthat if she were seenthe boy wouldn’t be believedin seeing them.Nevertheless, she was there,her iridescent spherea coronaover their column of sun,reflecting,refractingthe morning.The flowers turned to her,the green of…

God the Mother Speaks of Salt

Podcast version of this piece. I baptized you before you were born. After, rubbed you clean.I’ll cleanse all your wounds in season. You’ve forgottenhow to savor my holy. If you seek,you’ll find these veins run…

God the Mother Speaks of Xenia

Podcast version of this piece. I AM the children sleeping under mylar in a Texas warehouse.I AM the fathers lifting toddlers to their shoulders on our journeyto safety and rest. I’m safety and rest. But…

Benediction

Podcast version of this piece. Here’s the truth: My faith remainstepid. Lukewarm as summer rain. Spew-worthy. A compass in fragments, I saved pieces: base plate, arrow, needle.Reassembly is beyond me. Millennia ago, I stood on…

Book of Life, for Timothy Liu

Podcast version of this piece. If there is a literal bookon a plinth of filigreed gold, and an angelstanding as sentinel at heaven’s needle-eye entrance, who’s not to sayour names appear etchedon its pages, un-erasable.…

God the Mother Speaks of Hearts

Podcast version of this piece. won’t you agree with me the heart’s a glorious organ moon jelly  a ghost heart throbbing in oceanlily bulb  an earth heart humming undergroundbear  a furred heart curled up in cave’s dark I’m…

Mothersong

Podcast version of this piece. Let us amass our wandering kicks, wondering in awe at thesecostumes her womb hath made. O Motherof the sacred hearts, sing your peasant lullabies before our every sleep. Ring like…

creation story

Podcast version of this piece. He makes the light and the primeval oceans and the rapturous Word, but I have the dirt the ground the chthonic underbelly and sustenance of all. I have the jewel-toned…

Big Bang, with Sternutation and Seer Stones

Podcast version of this piece. i. In the beginning, Mother worked yleminto a loose sphere. A swirl of stray particles, stirred by the breeze blown through herstudio window, circled her workbench, tickled her nose. She…

Ascension, after John Donne

Podcast version of this piece. Embrace the first and forever night,Heartening as this Moon journeys from crestingTo full-figured, and in this ecstasy begins to fallEarthward, pulling me down to orchards heavyAnd underground, into mysteries of…

Acoustic

Podcast version of this piece. My devotion never translates to my fingers.There is something lost.The scaly chaff of my heart opens my lungs.I pinch my pic like a quillwhat can I scrawl in the dusk?…

Hymn to a Maple

Podcast version of this piece. Your inverted slant is an acute notewest to east in the shaded sunrisesurrounded as you are by that moatof rocks and weeds, dry as a chalk line. One Goliath’s push…

Salt Lake City, 1957

Podcast version of this piece. Sunday morning in Salt Lake City, whenfaithful Mormons flock to worshipat neighborhood wards, my father’ssecret psychiatric patients slip insidethe back door of 508 East South Temple,for fifty-five-minute appointments.A nurse impersonator,…

Color

Podcast version of this piece. Morning at homelistening to silenceand a solo cello,caressing old books,fog outside,fire inside. Treesin crystal veils,fog-doused sun,Earth’s palette replacedby soot and chalk. No color.Only grays,darker or lighter.No real black.No clean white.…

Book of Mormon Poetry James Goldberg, A Book of Lamentations

A few years ago I was researching poems written about the Book of Mormon. I had read Eliza R. Snow’s “The Lamanite” (adapted from a poem she wrote before becoming a Latter-day Saint titled “The…

Young Gods

Slipping off a Sunday dress—hoping you’ll join me and undress.No more dark slacks and white shirts,corruption of innocence tends to hurt.It’s worship too irreverent for pews,forgive my transgression against a holy muse,but, trust me, crisis…

Casual Violence in Sunday School

John the Baptist was a hairy scorpionwho skittered out from the wildernessand began stinging folksuntil they saw the Holy Ghost. He molted like all prophets do,lived in caves, under rocks,until the predators found him—took his…

The Leper

An armadillo dug up the grassin my parents’ yard last year— the kind that bounce buckshotoff their back and carry leprosy. If only I could do the same:materialize armor, lumber along. I could curl up…

Bi-Bestiary

I suppose only the animals that paired offand shuffled up the rampsurvived the flood. So this Bishop, pointing outthat we would rather flirtthan marry—well, he built an Ark out of the treeslining the church property.He…

Daffodils

Your lips are melting petals,Wilting into my mouth.My tears not clearEnough to revive them. When you learn to fly,Will they forget to dance?Lose their maypole eyelashesAnd languish, lonely, withWings cut. And yet,I pray, make me…

Created in His Image

I.The first lie they told me wasBlonde Jesus. Thick Belinda locks,And blue ocean eyes.He hangs on the cross, whiteLike a tender lamb, orWhite like a lily flower,Or like white snowSmothering brown ground. II.The second lie…

“I Cannot Describe Salt”: Elizabeth Willis, Poets in Exile, and the Church Invisible in the Age of Pandemic

Ever since Socrates banished poetry in Book X of Plato’s Republic with a flippant “if . . . poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her,”[1] Western poets…

Review: Poetry as Ceremony Tacey M. Atsitty, Rain Scald

O Holy People, show me how I am human,how I am soon to sliver. Stay please, for womanor man’s sake. Succor me from a telestial state,where I long to be self-luminous in a slateof granite.…

Candy Dish Sonnet

Already the heart-shaped dish on my end tablelies combed bare: long strips dug out============== a cleaning out============== a scratch in grain, table scraps lain out so comely, meaning to loveor hold cacao or almonds—those striaeof…

Lacing

VII. Sometimes I kneel down to play a gamefrom my childhood. Only then can I feelgrains of gravel, each pebble digs in so real.Sometimes I act as though I am the same,a young girl, rope…

Review: Dayna Patterson, If Mother Braids a Waterfall

Review: Dayna Patterson, Titania in Yellow

Review: Sunni Brown Wilkinson, The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

Review: Michael Lavers, After Earth

Review: Kate Piersanti, Life in Poetry

Review: Jan G. Otterstrom F., Move On

Review: Colin B. Douglas, Into the Sun: Poems Revised, Rearranged, and New

Review: R. A. Christmas, Leaves of Sass

Parousia

She says she was eating or opening a window or just walkingdully along, and always had been, but tonight there might befew angels. These things. Our dogwagging across the foreground, the porchthat still needs fixing…

Matriarchal Blessing

Your hands were on my head first. No formal ceremony. I was an infantand shouting clouds trundled and thundered,atmospheric pressure strangled my stubborn ears refusing airflow.The blue chair in the living room rocked,my cries received…

Grasshoppers in the Jar of the World

The jar is silent because it is full of praise.The grasshoppers are loud because they, too,are full of praise, clicking as they fly. The grasshoppers jump, but the jar is too high.They try to climb,…

Praying on Gravel

Not yet March, already weedsbring me to my kneeswith trowel and bare fingers. Under the loblollythe hellebore are in bloom,a periwinkle or two. The weeds are in the white gravelof the walk. My son has…

Until You Come

Taipei, ’97. I walk past side-streetvendors selling lychee nuts and blackrice cakes, to an acre of bare dirt,concrete pylons lifting a cloverleaf.A grizzled man by a beat-up Buickthrows gobbets of meat from the trunkto a…

James Goldberg and Ardis Parshall, Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic

His Twelve Points of the Scout Law (Grandpa Fesses Up)

Sunni Brown Wilkinson. The Marriage of the Moon and the Field

“To speak to Moses, God / put a stone in his mouth, put on / a sackcloth of verbs (want, need), / cleared his throat. Cried out” (3). Sunni Brown Wilkinson this way begins her collection The…

Karen Anderson’s Excavation of Ghosts Karin Anderson. Before Us Like a Land of Dreams

Mark 5:9—“My name is Legion: for we are many”—opens Karin Anderson’s masterwork Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. Anderson lyrically pools her ancestral narrative in sweeping loops, eddying history, religion, and landscape. Ghosts speak elusive,…

Becky, Not God

set the hour for their reunion.She’s under the greencanopy in the closed coffin. She signed away her body,except for her skin,so her hip bones might be recycled into screws to repair broken anklesor wedges to…

The Stars Saw God

I found God huddled in my father’s insanity.There beneath the layersof confusion—as to why none of us saw thespinning ball or the parade outside—I saw his vacant expression shine out likeGod-rays through the clouds.Clarity in…

Daryl Prays, The Snake River, and Insomnia

Daryl Prays How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! Lamentations 4:1 At fourteen, Daryl cut across an empty lotbehind a brick pharmacywhere he had picked up his mom’s pills(linden…

Genesis Chiasmus

In the Big Ending,My son used to sayWhen I read him the Genesis board book.Which was perfect, I thought.Such a start must surely have followedAn ending that was big.What brought that ending on? And whatGave…

Born Again

Because I did not fit a second timein the womb of my mother,I was born of my father instead. He held my arm to haul me from the waterand with the other, squared it to…

Women’s Blessing

Issue of Blood

Explaining God the Mother to My Father

Self Portrait in Which I Fail to Hide My Daddy Issues From Google

Willing the Storm

On Women and Priesthood Power

Mother’s Blessing

Reason Stares

A Found Poem

The “Blackblue Heartguts” of Trees Brooke Larson. Pleasing Tree.

Third Watch

Vernal

Dry Tree

True Religion

The Agreement

The Four Stanzas of the Apocalypse

Advent: Moose in Moonlight

Creek Skating

Bridegroom

Jesus Christ

New & Everlasting

Sweater

The Moldau in a Utah Living Room

The Mormon Peace Gathering

Sunday School

Judas

Devotion

Prodigal Daughter

What Ashmae Taught Me

Circles and Lines

January 21, 2019

Our Lady of the Temple

Prayers for the Altars

Friday Morning Shift

Skin of Garments

My New Temples

Then and Now

Limen

Ritual

Placenta

Dream Psalm

Walking Back to the ‘70s

Talitha koum

On Cherubim and a Flaming Sword by J. Kirk Richards

Review: It’s Lonely at the Top Ryan Shoemaker. Beyond the Lights.

Review: Mother, May We? Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry. Edited by Tyler Chadwick, Dayna Patterson, and Martin Pulido.

The Older Covenant

The Tree at the Center

One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days

The Pioneer Woman, St. George

Self-Portrait of Mormon Middle Child as Isabella

After the Curtain Falls, Isabella Speaks in Achromatics

Review: “Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry Lance Larsen. What the Body Knows

Raking

the fog

Soft

A Better Country

Poema de Halloween, 2001

Alpha

Sonnet—For Solstice

Agency of all that matters

Choose Your Own Belief: Of Sharks, Art, & God

Forgotten Birds

Domestiku

The Goodness of Created Things

If Joseph Smith Had Been Born in California

As If Nothing Matters

Faith

At Least

Trevor at the Fountain

Grand Canyon, North Rim

Ajalon Moon

The Holy Ghost in Polyhymnia’s Closet

The Holy Ghost in Melpomene’s Closet

Echo of Boy

Nosebleed (A Mormon Pilgrimage)

Christus

The Grammar of Quench

Not the Truman Show

Solomon the Wise

Averted Vision

Elegy / Prayer

True Ideas

My Sadness

The Skin of the Story

The Flock

Words

Eight Visions of the First

Dialogue 49.3 (Fall 2016): 151–155
Shiffler-Olsen turns Joseph Smtih’s first-person First Vision accounts into poetry.

Temple

Keeping Faith

October Above Trial Lake

Stony Places

My Sister Once Died

Grief

The Trail

The world was divided into three.  Three shards of sagebrush and sky.  That’s how it looked to Emma as she blinked through the thick wooden wagon spokes next to her head. She winced at the…

Baptism

Ordinary and Profane Poems

Tropical Butterfly House

Kill the Poets

Prophet by the Sea

One late afternoon just before sunset, the Prophet with white hair like the mane of a lion was walking by the sea with his friend, Fernando. They walked and talked about many things as the…

Mormon Conversions

The songs mutate 
like a virus in my blood: 
“I Am a Child of 
God,” “Firm As the Mountains 

From Utah Poems: To Elias

I brought my daughters to your grave
There in the river’s bend 
Not far from where, their age, 
I watched you dedicate the monument
To Jim Bridger: trapper, river-searcher. 

You lay deep in Utah’s summer
So still they couldn’t imagine 
This was their grandfather, 
Yourself a monument now 
To probing dry country.

Boy Diving Through Moss

A boy with joy and fear inside
stood on the plank
above the pond.
He sensed the cold, dark water
underneath,
and, daring,

Mental Gas

Charles to his teacher—Sir, you say
That nature’s laws admit decay—
That changes never cease ; 
And yet you say, no void or space ;
‘Tis only change of shape or place—
No loss, and no increase. 

New Acts of Poetry | Emma Lou Thayne, Spaces in the Sage, and Dennis Drake, What You Feel, I Share, and Christie Lund Coles, Speak to Me, and Gale Tampico Boyd, the lost, the found

More and more acts of poetry are being committed by Mormons these days. Before me are four volumes attesting to a variety of interests and a variety in printing and format. I am happy to…

On the Precipice: Three Mormon Poets | John Sterling Harris, Barbed Wire: Poetry and Photographs of the West, Clinton F. Larson, Counterpoint: A Book of Poems, and Emma Lou Thayne, Until Another Day for Butterflies

All three of these poets claim, explicitly or implicitly, to be “western,” and it is unlikely that anyone will challenge the claim. Their poems reflect the western landscape, or, more specifically, the Great Basin landscape…

Sacrament of Terror: Violence in the Poetry of Clinton F. Larsen

Dr. Clinton F. Larson has been acclaimed as a Mormon poet, even as the first Mormon poet. In his review of The Lord of Experience Professor John B. Harris seems to have represented many of…

The Poetic Mystique | Marily McMeen Miller Brown, The Grandmother Tree, and Vernice Wineera Pere, Mahanga: Pacific Poems

Beyond the sentience and the craft, under the sound and shape and color of the poem, one seeks the mystique that synthesizes and sets forth a poet’s real reality. Marilyn McMeen Miller  Brown’s book of…

New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women

The sensibility described by Amy Lowell—that there is something odd about women who write serious poetry—is still given substance today by the endangered state of the species. Even I will not waste time counting the few woman poets anthologized before Lowell’s time; contemporary statistics suffice.

Persephone

The trees are making white 
buds. Shrunken heads, 
last year’s berries, hang 
on leafing branches. I do not

Hold

Gray day with a brown leaf refusing 
at the end of a wind to drop, 
why is the crabbed clinging 
so intricate a part of the dance? 

Repapering the Kitchen

We probe and scrape and peel away the faded 
Multicolored layers of a lifetime, 
Like Schliemann 
(Who ? Grandmother asks) 

Gratitude

As I kneel to 
needlepoint nice words 
in quiet 
careful 

Memory’s Duty

Like an irresistible green vegetation 
easing over everything in time, 
a sense of comfort crept over my mother, 
weaving into her slowly tendrils of death. 

Bronzed Cadences

I hear faded trumpet sounds of summer 
and fill my arms with sleepy wildflowers, 
hold them close, feel the damp, 
smell the last fragrance. 

The Golden Chain

Paradise pendant from a golden chain 
opal pendant paradise 
swirling blue and green 
through white cloud streaks: 
golden chain gleaming on the breast of God. 

“Moonbeams From a Larger Lunacy”: Poetry in the Reorganization

Dialogue 16.4 (Winter 1983): 22–31
This study addresses poetry within the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and defines an RLDS poet as someone who belongs to the RLDS church and who has published poetry in some form or other.

The New Mormon Poetry | Lewis Home, The seventh day

A new Mormon poetry is beginning to emerge from the shadow of traditional, more bardic Mormon verse. Peeping about in the bright sun, blinking a bit and rubbing its eyes, it shows itself in poems…

Still Sounds of Winter

Waking from my loud dream 
I hear only what is here: 
the cornered stars rattling in glass 
and the slow roll of a drumhead moon. 

Charm for a Sick Child

we will dream now of a cave 
with a figure at the entrance, 
see the magic seeds she holds 

Another Birth

They dream of going hack. 
            The bars on their beds 
            are fingers before a face. 
Their knees rise up toward chins 

Fishers

In the last days of summer 
we walk through tall grass 
to the river 
long before the sun spills 

Expatriate

The Hawaiians are surprised that we also had beaches. 
            In their minds we represent one vast igloo 
            Filled with people anxious to escape 
            To winter in Hawaii. 

Born Again

As you enter the water unsinning, 
I shall repent eight years 
Of watching in the dark and loving 
Without turning on the light. 

Oil upon Oil

Like the sound of laying the warp, whispered names 
resonate within the grained, muraled, marble 
and curtain walls of this holy place, and veil 
the light and air with your form, hands 

How Much for the Earth? A Suite of Poems: About Time for Considering

The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality, this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1] About Considering Consider is…

Unfinished Sestina for the Secretary of Defense

We were inside the world. 
The children were sleeping. 
Light fell through the window. 
One of us wore red. 

The High Price of Poetry

Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

Returning

Mouth over the reed, 
you empty your feelings 
into the hollow heart. 
These are the pieces left: 

Diaries

I keep diaries in my head 
At night I write on sealed pages 
In dream codes a         sort 
Of dot-dot-dash Morse himself 

David and Bathsheba

When I slid the damask 
from its plastic sleeve 
to spread it on the table, 
the stain throbbed against crisp white. 

Fathering

When I first hold our children, 
Lately having labored alongside you, 
I promised many things — too many — 
Like the alcoholic too late repentant, 

The Interview

Tom looked at the sweat shining in the palms of his hands. Wiping them on his slacks, he opened the door into the stake president’s office and sat in a chair against the wall. A…

Benediction

Ardmoore told Carmen Stavely, who’d been away in Idaho visiting family, that what happened that Sunday morning was absolutely confidential. The bishop had instructed all who’d been present to keep the matter strictly to themselves;…

Lightning Barbs

I’d ridden this way a hundred times, 
Up Monday Town along the fence 
Dividing wheat from perennial sage 
Herding cattle to summer grazing 

One Year

The scene was written 
In advance, 
Rehearsed as often 
As the days of waiting 
Would allow. 

As Winter Comes On

Beyond my chrysanthemums and barbed fence, 
aproned sisters, some in hair nets like cafeteria cooks, 
whisk their casseroles to the kitchen of the old wardhouse. 

This Is My Body

A deacon offers the broken bread. 
Aware of awkward wait as bishop 
Receives the bread of ritual first, 
I take it up, thoughtless of blessing, 

All My Silent Midnight Hours

Things just get worse.
Which heavenly linoleum stripe
Leads to universal Emergency?
The resident angel could scour my soul.

Grains of Life: Fragments of a Sonnet Cycle

If I could give to you a dew-wrapped day, 
You have no need to tell me — I should know 
That you would use it all to make things grow. 
The furling bud, the fruiting branch are pay 

Sonnet for Spring

there’s honeysuckle in the exhaust, a fine green 
beard between walks, spring softens us 
again, now we confess the earth is a drum 
encased in living skin, not concrete, 

For the Bishop’s Wife

Some of us stood together 
on your star-gray lawn, 
sang you Christmas carols 
in the warm California air. 

Grandmother Envisions Her Own Death

A white pillar will glow from the sand as I die. 
Those backyard trees will shake their empty pods 
against the sky. My moldy body will sink 
into its bed, smothered by sinners. 

Winter Burial

Grey clouds, March-heavy hung over 
an old and mottled snow that day 
we brought him there to you. 

Seasoning

That fine white burst of bush blossom 
Has come again. Blast 
ing through the winter crust 
And scattering the afterbirth of spring, 

Nativity

The eyes of the beasts shine into my own. 
The archangel’s hair is on fire. I stumble 
through the mudprints of cows and ewes 
toward the damp side of the cave 

They Have Closed the Church My Father Helped Build

where he sawed through his finger 
now perpetually stiff, 
paid three assessments 

Evenings: His Church Calling

The sound burrs in my head 
like a racket of angry birds 
swirling from the sky. 
He’s gone again; 

Christmas in Utah

In barns turned from the wind 
The quarter-horses 
Twitch their laundered blankets. 
Three Steller’s jays, 

Cancun Beach, Mexico

What kind of God has made this sapphire tide 
stroking the white sand mouth of Yucatan, 
outrageously extravagant, a place 
fit for the baptism of God or kings 

Sons

New grain, you are comely; 
Long, straight, supremely vernal. 
Standing in Earth’s sun 
Unashamed green, 
You sway. 

Recollections from an Ex

mused in several voices 
to the tune of tinkling cymbals 

It wasn’t like she didn’t blend right in. 
In fact, based on the type of clothes she wore, 
People always figured she was from Salt Lake. 
Her skirts were long enough, that’s for sure.

For Brother de Mik

Cupped in your papery palm the rose 
was like a wound, flowering. 
Your wife nodded when we brought it. 
Yes, Papa, yes is pretty. Then 
she put it in a bowl to float 
and wilt on water. 

Lulu: On the Death of a Sister

Gone 
from the pampas. 
The only brunette; 
her first airplane flight at six months. 

Discouragement

                  Discouragement, 
is the adversary’s vision of the work 
revealed to and 

Stones; The Salutation; The Problem; Grandmother, Grandmother, Grandmother; Bishop

Feliz Navidad

No room at the inn, 
For them, anyway. 
It didn’t take ESP to read the situation. 
Just avoiding unpleasantness later. 
He had enough on his mind just then. 

Our Way

we were young 
and war was our way 
we’d fight in class 
or after school 

Luggage

You are required to keep the poundage low: 
two large cases and a carry-on: 
what you take for months overseas. 
In a year of famine, you have volunteered 

Pruned

I have always been a flowering vine, 
Seeking new trellises to trail on, 
Climbing ladders to the sky, 
Lusting over neighbor fences 

To Watch a Daughter Die

To watch a daughter die — 
One could practice a lifetime 
And never do it well. 
The labored hell 

Prayer of a Novice Rebel

Don’t try to drop little nuggets. 
Please, Sir, I mean. 
Or give me too much of a sign. 
I don’t want a sign now— 

Bodies

Weight — 
heavy weighting down 
of airier stuff 
in birth 

A Life Well-Shared | Margaret Rampton Munk, So Far: Poems

In the Fall of 1985 DIALOGUE published Meg Munk’s suite of poems entitled, “One Year.” In a mature voice and through particular images, she dramatized her battle with cancer. In the spring of 1986, this…

Winton Night Walks

At night along the canals 
Dad was best. 
Beside narrow dusty tractor roads 
Slow dark waters, 

August 6

“Go get dressed. You’re no man for this army!” 
I went, thanking for the first time the crook 
In my spine that stopped me buck naked 
From buck privacy, and took me back to you 

To a Modern Isaac

I’m no Abraham. 
I’ve bowed to a few idols in my day — 
Just somewhat unintentioned. 
Sacrificing children to idols 

Navel

I drive by a red farmhouse 
in the setting sun. Orange morning 
darts through rippled glass. 
High-glossed linoleum 

The Oldest Son Leaves for Nagoya

Surprisingly tall, he looks down toward 
His six-inch shorter father 
And shifts his feet, anxious 
For the moment of departure, awkward in uncertainty

Burial Service

The place they put him seemed extravagant — 
Sprawling flowers, hovering crowd, artificial grass 
To cover up plain dirt. 
The coffin shone, wood lustrous as the new organ 

For Bonnie

Ever since the homestead days, when you, 
The eldest, baked the bread for barefoot boys 
Flushed from the corn for lunch, the care we knew 
Was testimony of your oaken poise. 

Here’s the Church

While the organist pumped 
“Let Us All Press on in the Work of the Lord,” 
and the chorister napped her arms 
like a whooping crane, and some sat there 

Failed Friendship

Sisters nod and smile, 
inclining intimately toward her in the crowded room. 
Years of testimonies shared and friendships deified 
linger in the worn cushions and heavy curtains. 
She brushes jostling shoulders, turns and feels 

Lesser Voices

Sun-circled history 
Paints famous fools 
But leaves plain brown men 
Unremarked 

sonnet on life’s dangers

cop and father, he cautioned us of more 
than boogeymen and fire, in case of snakes, 
freeze where you are, same for skunks and por-
cupines, brave enough to tromp on cracks, 

The Lord’s Table

The banquet table was spread, 
But I could no longer smell 
Satisfaction in the room. 

Two Fishermen in Hong Kong

We couldn’t find anyone 
in that inner-city maze. 
Between thick buildings 

Three Poems for My Mother

For Your Birthday: Planting in the Rain
Fall Canker
A Place for Roses

Early Through Winter

Someone went shooting rabbits last night 
blasting any flesh too slow to dodge. 

I track the powdered ground until I toe 
a scarlet gash melted to concrete.

Pure Thin Bones

José Luís was sick. That was why Michelle and Renata stopped by to see him on their way home from missionary zone meeting. They walked with Nielsen, his companion, who had gone to the meeting…

Three Generations of Mormon Poetry | A zipper of haze; Tinder; Christmas Voices

Dennis Clark loves poetry and poets, and he also loves to write poetry. I don’t think this can be said of everybody in the poetry business. These three chapbooks are evidence of Dennis’s development as…

Inadvertent Disclosure: Autobiography in the Poetry of Eliza R. Snow

Three turning points mark the early life of Eliza R. Snow: the 1826 publication of her first newspaper verse, her 1835 baptism as a convert to Mormonism, and her 1842 sealing as a plural wife…

Grandpa

you talk of breakaway stallions 
with hooves poised to strike teeth, 
years on long lean roads past Las Vegas 
selling church pews down the valley. 

Passion Poems | Emma Lou Thayne, How Much for the Earth?

One might suspect that a book of poems published by Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms Race might possess as interesting a history as the poems that comprise it. How Much for the Earth? by…

A Lot to Like | Eugene England and Dennis Clark, eds., Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems

Harvest is a good title for this collection of twentieth-century Mormon poetry with its bounty, variety, and degrees of ripeness and appeal. One feels a generosity of spirit emanating from this aggregate, a poetic vision…

One of the Women

One of the women inside me 
cannot rejoice with anyone. 
She stays in the shadows 
bowing her head. 
Her long hair has never been cut. 

The Slow Way Home

She leaves the women in her husband’s house 
and makes a slow way home 
to her own mother, to friends singing 
as they bring sweet butter 
for the first month, molasses 

Deity

Who is he from the Sunday pulpit 
acquiring the air of sins 
with his lecture, 
hell’s woes never hidden 

Daddy Hung Me Out

He hung me next to the load of dripping clothes. 
I was just a child! Couldn’t walk! Couldn’t talk! 
Too frozen stiff to cry! But strong enough 
to clench my monkey fists around the line. 
I still can see the pomegranate bush. 

The Blood in My Veins

Tonight while combing my long dark hair, 
                        Sprinkled with strands of white, 
                                    I am grateful for my legacy 
            And wish others would not look down 

If I Had Children

If I had children, I might name 
them astrometeorological names: 
Meridian, a girl. Zenith, a boy. 
Eclipse, a pretty name for either one. 

I Can Wait For

I purposely forget what you look like 
so each time I see you I am surprised 
again by your beauty. Your name is the 
charm I offer nervous cats instead of 

Heartbreak Hill

I go to Brenda’s wedding wearing 
her ex-husband’s cast-off temple garments. 

The Next Weird Sister Builds a Dog Run

With fortune’s damned 
            quarreling smile, 
                        the neighbors complain 

Transformation

I had wanted your wife 
to be born to the graces, 
elegantly muted 
in dove-gray and gloves, 
to take tea from fine china, 
walk perfumed in silk. 

A Call Before the Obituary

His name, distant to me, 
opened your mouth to blackness. 

It seemed you laughed before 
the half-crow caw fell out.

Island Spring

Always she is there on that far island
in my mind, where it is always night,
and the moon tears into a world of leaves,
and is torn. A child, she steps 

Innocence

I confess I have invented a word 
for the thing I am and the thing I have done. 

It is a pleasant word and may be spoken 
to young children or written in their books.

I Consider Jonah’s Whale

You must have been lonely, 
slowly swimming 
in that vast darkness, 
waiting 

Burn Ward

Late at night, the kids in their rooms come 
drifting towards me, thinking of home, perhaps, 
wrestling a kiss fire of pain. 
And the ward is yellow with breathing, 

Sisters

My sister and I had no whispered secrets 
between us, shared no hollyhock days. 

Being Baptized for the Dead, 1974

It throbbed a little, the gash in my left palm. 
I pressed the gauze, something to finger 
while we waited —boys here, girls over there, 
all of us wearing jump suits heavy enough 

In the Back Lot at Hillview Manor

On any given Thursday, 
Papa adjusts the strap 
And plucks out a phrase or two 

Baptism: As Light as Snow

Cool, waist-high, 
shallowerthanremembered; 
eight years ago, it seemed 
that I would float. 

One Sunday’s Rain (After Word of My Father’s Illness)

All morning: rainwater 
off the roof onto pebbles 
washed smooth of pale soil 
in the garden. 

The Dark Gray Morning

The dark gray morning has its eye on you
Forget about the stormy
you have more pressing worries. What to do?
The dark gray morning has its eye on you

Cure

The white man is loud, 
he is also blind. 
His dreams are bad 
and teach him nothing. 

The Virgin Mary Confronts Mary of Magdala

Don’t say that. 
I never called you whore. 
It’s a dream word I never knew. 

How Could We Have Known

that loneliness is like 
the whole of the moon 
rising in a sky so lucent, 
the clouds cast shadows 

The Perseids

Nerved sparks, the Perseids 
tonight, wincing out over Loafer 

Father, you taught me to name
these — each streak of fire

Mechanics

They tell us now 
That the darkness of space 
Is what’s left over, 

The Hero Woman

When the days drag on like TV reruns,
The Hero Woman conies. 
She walks in with long strides from the hips.
She keeps her eyes on the horizon. 

Patchwork

The fields south of Salt Lake 
Must be old. 
From the air, in October, 
They lie barren, empty, 

Losing Lucy

Just as we were meeting, she 
Slid quick away—too far— 
And I, surprised at sudden loss, 
Ran leaping after her. 

Nickel Girls

Sometimes boys would stand 
on the high school stairs 
and throw nickels at girls 
in low-cut blouses, hoping 

Over Coffee, 600 B.C.

A friend of mine told me — 
so I know it’s true — 
she saw someone in the road 
behind her house 

Song of the Old/Oldsongs | Leatrice Lifshitz, Only Morning in Her Shoes: Poems about Old Women

As Leatrice Lifshitz explains in her introduction, this unusual collection of verse represents “an attempt to return old women to the circle, to the continuum of women and of life” (p. viii), and its rich…

Ovum

The egg insists on its own reality, 
So I go along, easy, not one 
To counter what I don’t know. 

The Good Life

Why do I strain for a freedom found outside,
Where worlds in time and space lie wide and full?
My room is closed and airless while the tide
Slaps up the pier and churns me in its pull.
And yet old times of weary venturing pall. 

Jackrabbits

Grandma teased us 
for the time it took 
to kill one jackrabbit 
on our backyard picnic table. 

Waiting

The absence of a signal 
is itself information, 
a zero giving meaning to binary ones. 
The call that doesn’t ring, 

A Vision of Judas

The light was too harsh 
in the South. All day 
I sat beneath that tree 
growing darker and darker 
until I was all shade. 

Two Sisters Visit Dieppe

We leave the town at noon 
For a beach of white pebbles 
And small, clean bones. The wind 
Whips our sensible skirts, and sun glints 

Celebrations | Emma Lou Thayne, Things Happen: Poems of Survival

The publication of a new book of poetry is an occasion for celebration, particularly when the poetry is by such a generous and great-hearted soul as Emma Lou Thayne. But the title of this volume,…

When I Swam for the Utah Valley Dolphins

My mom could sleep each night 
without waking except 
when my ear ached so much 
I became a nightmare 

The Mistake of the Psycholinguists

They say people nominalize too much. 
We tell ourselves, “I am in pain,” 
instead of simply, “I hurt.” 
“Pain is not a prison you’re locked in,” they say. 
“You hurt because you choose to hurt, 
and you can choose to not hurt.” 

Art and Half a Cake

On Saturday mornings, mother baked good bread. 
She always called my two sisters, 
My two brothers, and me 
To come and eat the crusts hot, 
Spread with butter and strawberry jam 
Made from strawberries she had picked and washed. 

My Mormon Grandmother

“Another girl.” 
            Unheralded birth 
                        Beginning nothing. 

Coney Island Hymn: Shore

They clap their hands together 
            and shout out 
            and sing the same song 

The 20/20 Leap

I approach God— 
the distance is immense. 
My vision is clear, 
I am not. 

Ecclesiastical Check

White pawn moves 
forward two steps 
onto an open square. 
A black knight in grace 

Woman Bathing | Authority

She performs the persistent ritual of cleansing, 
the splashing of water 
upon her scarlet apple flesh 
sullied with blood 

Hands

In the chapel, 
In the straightbacked 
Ache of the pew, 
We held them—lap toys 

Missionary Court

Hunched over and rocking a little, 
he answered the president in stutters, 
and I wrote it all down in the ledger— 
the girl’s name, how many times, my pen touching 

Late

I mourn my father. 
I am afraid to relive him 
lest my heart break. 

Relativity

While a hummingbird scans it for wires 
the red rosebud explodes in slow motion, 
the two velocities firing simultaneously. 
Riddled with inconsistencies, the rose is 

Return (for my father)

Over the terra cotta earth 
your truck like a cleft-foot goat 
grazes homeward. 
The down of trees in the hills 

Manna in the Desert

“The satisfaction brought by morning dew 
is more than human stomachs can endure,” 
the men insist, hoping that they will die. 
“The satisfaction brought by morning dew 

Variation on a Love Letter

I have written this letter to you before 
and I will write this letter to you again. 
In it I tell you that the days are starkly blue
and unbearably warm, that the cooling storms

The Book Handed Her

Wanting to be one of twelve princesses 
to disappear down a trap door 
underneath her bed each night 
and dance to weariness in a haunted place 

Winter Fast Offerings

When no one was faking sick, we were nine — 
just enough to cover the routes if someone 
doubled up. We argued over the packets, 
weighing thickness against distance, 

Entire Unto Himself

Already cold and stiff by the time I arrived, 
It was a shallow shadow, gray against black; 
A collar of blood fringed its matted coat. 

The Pulpit

It is a last bastion, 
The pulpit. Prominent 
Among muscular box shapes; 
Fenced off and jutting skyward 

Yellow Hair

I have got a blond, it’s true. 
The others comment, 
laugh behind their hands: 
where did that one come from? 

Sestina for the Coming Fall

In fall, I try to understand the dying 
of so many innocent leaves. The changes 
happen imperceptibly, till the once-verdant is carmine 
or golden, but such pulsing color is only 
prelude to their silent fall to the dark flesh 
of life that decayed before them. A nectarine 

Saint Theresa and the Lepress

Few teeth remain in her mouth, 
And the mouth exhales rottenness. 
I turn my back, my nose. 
Still she presses in. 

What El Salvador Meant to a Three-year-old

an iguana in our empty pool 
            his eyes jumping wild 

a metal fence around the yard 
            where naked boys waited outside for food

Beth-lehem

Jacob and Rachel 
But a little way to come to Beth-lehem, 
and the pains came hard upon her. She heard, 
“Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.” 

Night Myths

Sleepless with fever, 
under one small lamp you stared 
at a cherry wood cabinet, dark whorls 
spiraled like galaxies and polished 

Notes for a Son, 19, Living Abroad

Often when entering sleep 
I start awake, your form having drifted 
into vision, your name embedded 
in the thickness of my tongue. 

Snowy Night

Whose poem this is, I think I know— 
New England bard of spring and snow, 
But eighth-grade teachers don’t explain 
The depths to which the poets go. 

Becoming a Writer

Early on, in class, the smooth new pencils, 
the ice-white paper, copper-bladed rulers, 
all spoke order, a progression of lines. 

Breadcrumbs

The fairytales were wrong: 
to identify big feet 
with wicked stepsisters, ugly with unloved, 
princes and frogs with anything 

Exercising the Priesthood

A Wednesday evening 
down in the back 
of the chapel, we played 
King of the Mountain on the 

Postcard

I debated hours, whether to send you a kiss 
by the river or the overabundant lips 
of a Rosetti madonna. You get both: See 
the pansies the madonna holds? That’s how I know

Litany

All night, all day, angels 
watching over me, my Lord. 

And him slipping off, 
letting the door close

Household of Faith

From where we sat on the fourth pew 
the three square windows looked like cubes 
of shimmery gold 
vertically stacked 

God With Us

At the baptismal Erma sings “Que grande es El,”
her voice breaking, 
and the woman she has brought to Jesus, 
clothed in white on the front row, weeps. 

A Body That Expands

My sister sings Puccini in the shower. 
A fever ripped the muscle of her heart 
when she was five but now she is almost 
twenty-one and lovely. She leaves music 

Double Exposure

The picture gathers from a host of things— 
From giggles of remembering, not play 
By play but one word lifting from another 
Into a rearview record, a happy weather 

Sacrament Prayer

It’s the simplicity I like, no pulpit thunder, 
no fiery “Thou shalt nots” rattling the soul. 
A set prayer, phrases you can roll around 
your mouth all week, then string together 

Brando

Marlon Brando’s such a babe in Guys and Dolls,
it’s an ideal, makes you feel 
positively reverent, same as orange blossoms, 
the way they delicately ask to seduce 

Warren Travels With His Father

in the 
dense Montana heat, the BLM vehicle musty 
and smelling of oil, sweat, and age. 

Decoration Day

No funeral today, but the town 
has business at its cemetery. 
Dust leads the procession; 
handles of rakes and hoes protrude 

Day Dreams

Man of her house, her rooms 
Are haunted by dreams. 

Leavened by cool morning light, 
Loft become sanctum, he lolls

Sole Makers

I wonder if I can still heal myself? 
I’ve done it once before, 
back when I cut my palm open 
trying to be your blood brother. 

The Man Without Sin

There’s this house where 
four retarded men live who 
go to church on Sundays. 

Lancashire Saint Dies

He wanders the back alleys of his childhood
Mossed and decaying bricks
Tower skyward to imprison him
Cobbles rise to thwart his escape

Leave of Absence

walk out and arrive 
near the lake— 
any route taken 
leads eventually 
to this 

Resurrection

One gunmetal day, late fall, 
a fat shabby robin tired 
of flying in her natural world, 
desired to swoop across our couch, 

Our Fecundity

What have we done? 
This wrinkled child 
did not ask for entry; 
it answered our call 

For My Father, 1934-1990

Have you noticed, then, that sound moves 
differently in fall—such falling 
of leaves, a fall 
from warmth and 

Mama and Daddy Standin’ By

Best thing that ever happened 
In church was when Martha 
Got Nancy to sing “Summertime” 
On Mother’s Day— 

In Passing To Her Fathers

In Saint George, Lena McCain had cancer. 
She set her house in order. 

In Las Vegas, the doctors went after the cancer with a knife,
            got it, watched her closely.

Bean Counting

She adds up all the names 
people have given her over the years: 
‘Vain, difficult, cold.” 
Someone once told her that 

I Have Learned 5 Things

1. The sulfurous flame 
            sunbeams in corners 
                        lightning like cracked glass 
                                    the bulb of an idea 
                                                your dark eyes 

Aspens

Parchmental stand aspens, 
Paper atrmeble accepts scars, 
Words healing standing parchmental 

Magi

Through Perean hills and Arabian desert,
pacing our journey by the pulsing star, 
we come here, finally, to this quiet shelter
that houses the holy—to Bayt al-Lahm. 

Commentary

Wedged into the same chair, 
my husband and son station 
themselves, duplicates 
of each other. 
Too tired to talk, 
my son listens. 

Ireland

When did I find the music 
of another open-window autumn? 
I’ve left more vodka empties near 
the wardhouse dumpster. 

To Joseph of Nazareth: Patron Saint of Fathers Dispossessed

Joseph, I too have known that sad angelic word
Visitation 
Which renders a father not-father. 
Your children 

Hobby Horses

What holds us together is our discourse— 
hints and asides, a whisper in the cloakroom, 
School of the Prophets held across the backyard hedge.
Stealth gives Adam-God a reviving breath, 
let Gog and Magog flex their muscle in the U.N. 

Movements Giving Off Light

Drops of water stretch and hold 
in the sunlight: the small icicle 
sways from the eaves in the thaw. 
I see it fall 
because I have come to the window 
at this moment. 

Mummy Pendulum

A man’s last wish 
should be sacred. 

I want to be wrapped 
like a ball of roots

Sariah

She’s not Abraham’s Sara, 
who laughs and talks 
to angels 
as if the state of her womb 

Jesus is Coming

The tapping of the shower is 
the insistent brush of reeds 
along the Charles and the slap 
of oars I’ve just left. 

Marcus

It is not that I miss you now 
but I miss it—when I 
swallowed your finger the first night 
and restrained myself in deference to 

Secrets under the Surface | Linda Sillitoe, Crazy for Living: Poems

Just under the surface of the obvious lie the secrets. Linda Sillitoe sees, hears, tastes them, feels where they lead, trusts them, takes us along. It is never a perilous journey. Rather, it resounds with…

The Invisible Woman

The invisible woman is angry. 
Boy is she mad. 
She took her books to the library last night 
and last night she burned the library down. 

Going Dark

            To escape from pursuers 
I flee to the car, 
gun the gas down the highway. 
            They’re on my tail. 

Serving the Papers

They sit in stiff unmatched recliners, 
a faint halo of grease smearing 
the head rests. The Bishop asks again, 
Do you want your names removed? 

His Sermon

He says there’s very little truth 
in the world 
and he can’t wait to go out, 
preach, and spread his own— 
like he has the corner on it. 

Nestling

They hatched today. Last night 
when I peeked among the apples 
they were eggs, four, end to end 
among twigs and scraps and a twitch 

For the Girl Who Saw Her Mother Cold

July twenty-third in the canyon is 
almost like hell-fire—sulfurous hot 
waves off the powdery earth while 
the children play in the trees, 

A Courtship

I remember the great bear 
circling the blue night, 
the black juniper and no motion. 

On X-ing

crossed out—an inexact word in typescript 
            but not erased 
left unused—an unread book 
            but not unneeded 

My mama’s hands

can hold eight eggs 
when she walks from the 
refrigerator to the stove, 
bacon fat popping out 

Storytime

Even now in the stony 
courtyard under withered
vines the characters 

Early Winter

Home from the dance in a howling blizzard. 
The kitchen door blown open. 
A heap of snow swirled onto linoleum. 
I’m entranced at the violence, 

Clean

Creekbottom 
pushes up between our toes 
like mushrooms. 
Summer water 

In a Far Land

So many women on their knees 
that if I knew how to tell them 
they could find hope here, 
or that there the men 

Pilgrimage

After ten hours of driving, out of the old station wagon.
My mother, roadworn, care poor, 
steps over the fallen gate. 

Basilica

Frank’s photos—
are like his fiction—
show clean, hard lines. 

Bathing a Child

            Elbow-deep in shallow water 
            with porcelain pressed against my breast 
I dragged the sudsy washcloth 
over your squirming body 

The Violent Woman

Sarah your clarinet 
body squeaks at the valves, moans 
off key, and lying still 
and flat as a paper doll 

Naked

I was expecting ripened avocadoes, Michael, 
or half-used spices—the usual throwaways before
a move. Not a grocery bag of garments, unopened,
each slippery package a skin you never tied on.

Cap Meets the Prophet Brigham

On the third day he stopped for a deserved rest,
though not intentionally. The bishop, she explained,
was hunting pheasants and wouldn’t be back
for hours. So he collapsed into a straw bed 

1844

Signs in the heavens. Great arcs of light
at midday. Drew it. Intend 
to ask Joseph what it means … 

Snows

That snow falling out there, not in flakes 
But in clusters of flake, little snow balls 
Loosened by November’s sun still barely struggling
Through the harvest haze, snow falling 

The Time Traveler Comes to Cana

So I went to Cana and spent Sabbath 
in that house, their guest, before the wedding.
The daughter spoke with joy of her marriage;
the mother sat impatient—Sabbath’s end 

March Children

Her head nestled in the palm of my hand 
not so long ago, 
little lips tugged my breast, 
fingers pink as birthday candles 

Negative Space

It’s hard being Mormon Mormon mind regards nipples

Razor Sharp

You, my father, 
Too damned independent at seventy-five 
To admit you could no longer handle 
A simple double-edge Gillette, 

1948

She was learning German that year, 
a war bride, living in Darmstadt, 
trying to say ich in the back of her throat, 
the guttural r of Herr and Frau, to introduce 

The Three Boats

And God came to me and shewed me 
a boat on troubled waters. 
“Shall you stretch forth your hand 
to steady the vessel before it founders?” 
“I shall,” I said, and took the boat 
in my hand and removed it from danger. 

Weight

He was folding garments in the back bedroom
when he heard one of his kids telling 
his wife that his ex had “lost a lot of weight”— 

hospital healing

of course a two-inch badger 
carved from liver-colored stone 
with arrows bound to his back, 
could not make the difference. 

Sleeping on Wood

The blue ice is melting 
off the high ridge, 
draining down through the trees. 
The blade of rock darkens in the sun.

RELEASE: A Moment

I did not plan survival or otherwise 
            craving absence for so long 
so when awakened that snowless night 

The Freeway

is two currents of light on the hill. 
One drains into the western sky, 
the other, into the maw of rock behind me.
I am a dazzled part of light that opens 

How Things Look from the Other Side of the Lake

Put water between the highway and yourself; 
put a fence too, and some cows to graze. 

For as long as you sit on this rock, 
you are not driving north or south,

Cereal Polygamy

One of his had just spilled 
some Cheerios, and one of hers 

was griping over the Grapenuts. 
He was about to holler

Brides of the Afternoon

White brides, dark grooms 
lustrous silks on 
an orange afternoon, 
scuffing through dry leaves 

Slant Sonnet for Melissa

This visit you talk of Merlin in both poem and prose,
and how he transformed Arthur to insect or mole,
teaching him how to become. 

Ghost Month

In China, in August, ghosts are released 
from hell for a month of fun. Late July 
behind the gates, ghosts start queuing up, 
raising their hands and swearing to the guards

Reply to: “You Are a Spiritual Person”

Something wants spiritual 
yet hesitates, not wanting to show a lack 
of substance   intellect 
to not win at tennis or good looks 

Toni’s Song

She prays in the shower, lifts 
her face to the streaming water 
god, to the shining metallic head 

Because Last Night Was Friday Night

Because last night was Friday night 
I had to search to find a quiet place 
and when I found it I wanted to leave it 
though I wasn’t even working off a mean gin drunk. 

Saturday: One Version (Fourth Week of an Unidentified Illness)

Tired of enclosure, I sit near what view 
of trees and sky my house will give. 
Across the back fence, my neighbor 
who can hardly walk 

The Prophet’s Dream

An angel came to me and said, O Pitiable Fools! 
O Foolish Mortals! O Everlasting Damnation! 
I said, Perhaps you will be willing to shew me 
their eternal lot, and my own. He said, Come. 

What Remains

Day rolls over, 
pulling at the covers of dusk. 
Lights come on in sequence 
and before they go off 

Aristocrats

Two black snakes 
Made it down the hill 
Through the high grass 
Among the wild apple trees 

His Faith-Promoting Story

Thirty-six years after his baptism, 
nobody was converted. 

His grown kids were apostates, and his exes 
were either nudists or inactives

Bread: A Returning

In the hayfields are loaves 
to be lined along barns. 
Like monuments to a lost art 
they have browned in the summer heat, 

The Statue of Brigham Young at South Temple and Main, Salt Lake City

The cupping hand cradles the winds 
that whir like crickets 
beneath the swoop of traffic lamps. 
The legs like stumps of pillars 

I Will

Bitter herbs and tears 
Mulch, water the spiritual 
Roots of human neuroses 
Surely God sees through 

Hemmed In

Above, the divorcee 
with the baggy eyes and bleached hair
draws an evening bath. 
The dull pat of bare feet 

A Killing Frost

When the cold front came, all the leaves went limp.
That was that—no more white flies on the patio,
one bloom still curled tightly in its calyx, 
its promise of color fading. Yet there’s nothing

George

He speaks in a poetry of mumbles, not quite rambling
under the breaking sky about what happened 
half his life ago and the end of a promise 
that makes him angry. Shows the confusion 

Descending Order

Snow falling into the pond 
leaves you weak with its metaphor 
of sadness, as though all that makes you
could be instantly broken down, 

Untitled

Sing a song of sixth sense, 
a pocket full of Why; 
four and twenty Reasons, 
beams in your eye. 

Fall Weekend at Rehoboth Beach

Out along the shore the sky is wide. 
Ducks fly, drafting like cyclists in Central Park 
but unfettered, their path dictated only by season, instinct,
and windshifts. Below with me 

In a Far Land

So many women on their knees 
that if I knew how to tell them 
they could find hope here, 
or that there the men 

They Eat Dogs in China

            Or so my father said— 
the clock on the mantle silenced, 
            that family Bible 
                        in his hands a weight in the pans 

Gaining Darkness

Going down to the cellar 
a child awakens to tendrils 
of winter vegetables 
that elongate like white worms.

American Christians Visit Mt. Nebo

We had only cameras 
and yearning, but the wind rasped 
stone like a hot tongue 
and cameras and yearning 

The Miró Exhibit at MoMA*: Dec. 21, 1993

These bodies 
look like they were pancake mix 
that, when poured on the skillet, 
turned out to look sort of human.

Pieta

Lying on my mother’s bed 
listening to tropical rain skitter 
across a mottled screen, 
I hold my daughter, sprawled in sleep,

She’iiná Yázhí*

As earth began to shed the snowy clouds of
death and slumber, 
as darkness ebbed within the solstice, 
you slept in my dark womb, 

“I Do Remember How It Smelled Heavenly”: Mormon Aspects of May Swenson’s Poetry

Any discussion of Mormon culture or doctrine in the work of nationally prominent American poet May Swenson must begin with the caveat that Swenson, for virtually all of her adult life, was not a believing…

By Extension

He blisters his hand on the iron she forgot to unplug,
investigates every outlet, detects exactly three more
potential fire hazards, bandages himself 
in the prescribed method. She is not a cautious woman.

August

Ahumming stillness. In the orchards up and down the valley
the pith of summer turns slowly to juices. Ripeness:
what my grandmother knows, hunched in her silence.

The Greening

Pluck them out one by one 
Melancholy, dearth, unableness 
Squeeze out the poisons 
Scratch away the sting 

Origami Birds

I release my pretty doves 
and they ascend like sparks 
to disappear. And look 
how restless I am, 

Properties of Water

In the dark, 
a cat will fly on rain-slicked blacktop 
like a bat, 
hydroplaning, flicking malevolence sideways
out of fluorescent eyes. 

Seconds Coming

Entering St. John 
Population 1440 

Leaving St. John 
Visit Us Again!

Awake to the Ineffable: Some Would Call It Kundalini

Out of sleep 
Levitation 
Stirrups of light 
Palms aglow 

To Sleep with the Ineffable: Inviting My Sweet Informants

Cheek to pillow I slide my scalp up 
away from my ear the way I lifted the mother of pearl stem on the
silver lid 
that closed and opened to disappear under itself 

The Soon-to-hibernate Bear Addresses His Public

Slow way down. 
Get off the freeway. 
Park the car. 
Stop racing the engine. 

“White” of “Pure”: Five Vignettes

Dialogue 29.4 (Winter 1996): 119–135
The Book of Mormon variously uses “white” and “pure” in the same verse in different editions. This article traces the history of those changes, who was behind them, and why.

Leaving

Leaving you 
leaves me wishing that I could hold you
like a small stone in my pocket 

Black Moroni

Painted on the wall behind the seats where choir sings 
See the shining figure in a steep green wood 
Angel wears a shirtwaist robe, fabric wing as thin as filament
He looks downslope where Joseph kneels, treasure spread in dirt

Life-line

Tonight I wear your dress 
like a shell to my most graceless springing. 
The brown velvet shimmers with the folds 
and the tucks hang like loosely gathered wind, 

Silver Footprints

Neither masculine nor feminine a powerful 
androgyny like wind surrounding shoulders
of a crowd, drawing in, along, persuasive as scent. 

Alaska Girlhood

Eden was a winter 
when gods skated the earth. 
They’d warm themselves by the fires 
that lit the man-high snowbanks 

We Dress for Armageddon

for Shelley Turley

When trouble—an earthquake, a heart— 
Comes to town, breaking dams, 
Leveling shops, clubs

Kick and Muff

I hear the fist-sized heart 
cannon in the fog of rhythm 
death and future. 
From it I take the few things 

Shorn

Locking the door to the bath, 
opens the collar of the shirt, 
raises chin, fingers buttons 
from their holes, lengthens torso,
molts like a snake. 

Passing On, Holiday

It’s Christmas 
and our mothers, weary in their memories,
in their good for others (those holiday chores)
keep their feet under them like birds.

Fire in the Water

Barely a man 
he stands trembling 
water lapping at thighs in cotton white
right arm to the square 

Oasis

At dusk, the pool waits in silence, 
found by your feet after you rip up 
the map. Suddenly in the tangled grasses
and twilight the birds stop calling, 
and the trees finger your face. 

Desert Bloom

There are no maybes in the desert; 
you have to be lizard-quick or shrivel and die. 
The Rio Grande is muddy from its occasional pause,
here where survival is yes or no. 

Stake Mission

Their place was a junkyard with Joshuas,
and they’d play Mom and Pop 

to any delinquent on the desert. 
We’d be forever having

Kayenta

Summers we paint relocation houses 
on the res, beige and grey, 
“Navajo white/’ our brushes dripping
Dutch Boy on red Arizona earth. 

Moon Phases: Childhood

when it topped the mountains 
the shell of moon laid down 
            such plenty 
                        all over the fields 

Mountain Turn-out: Week After My Father’s Funeral

In the ghost-smoke of eight thousand feet, 
the road back looks deserted. 
Below me, a hawk rises, 
wings throbbing stillness, and I watch 

Father Sky/Mother Earth

I am turning the irrigation water 
Into my garden 
It’s two in the afternoon 
The reddening tomatoes jerk up, widen their eyes

How She Comes

Like a storm rowing in. All around tree limbs stagger,
weeds lie flat. Wind and sun like familiars, 
canyons nesting in the shadows. Bright feet 
never touching down, while the air boils behind her

Fall Is the Wrong Analogy

this hesitant collapsing 
of a canopy that will billow 
in windy spring— 

Martyrs

A brigade of ants marching over torsos 
cast in bronze. The mouths that cannot speak 

On the Death by Cancer of Someone Too Young

for Jeffrey Montague 

Your wondering is over. 
A radiance has taken you. 
Now part of the council of all beings

Woodwork

He squints and turns the beam around,
swapping it end for end. He runs 
his eye down the length of the crown
and sees an overall design 

Take These Depositions

Let’s talk of griefs, 
of wombs, 
of epithets. 

Straw

The straw of the cut grain 
Gold mounding the hill 
On the way down from my house 
On the mountain 

Birthday Dreaming

Sixty-four years ago my grandmother was shifting in her sleep, admiring her growing belly with gentle hands, welcoming the October nightfall that enclosed her like prayer. That’s how pregnancy is, ordinary things move on without…

“Watercress Grows Best in Running Water”

Days after his death, I felt him 
newly jovial alongside me. And weeks later,
when I again dreamed him young, 
handing me a pail of watercress, 

Lily Foot

Did I hold the tiny Chinese shoe
or simply gaze at it 
encased in museum glass 
in the old mining town 

Templum: A Place Thought of as Holy

I. The coming 

Inside this precise granite 
the immensity of the walk comes home

After a Late Night, Waiting

Again, that rim before sleep: 
            I tried to pause there—listened 
to the mantle clock, the distant 
            sprung rhythm of a dog barking, 

Out of the Night: Childness

From my Mystic Life after near-death accident 

More than a state of being 
A new being 
Suffused in light

Sacrament Hymn

Jesus Deathkiller, 
God’s Lifer, Earth Rover, Gift: 

Be sure, 
in your name and our hope,

From the Land of Nod

I will go on 
loving you, even after 
you have stopped loving 
anyone. What if 

Holy Sonnet for Mother’s Day

No need to pierce my side with soldier’s sword 
Or bleed from every pore as in Gethsemane; 
Designed by Thee to shed blood naturally 
Cycling with the menstrual moon. Lord, 

History

Small things: 
the smell of 

blocks he cut 
from pine light

A Prayer Addressed to Lord of Death

O Yama, God of Death, wield not your arrogant power!
Shield me from your wrath and dark terror. 
You well know that you’ll succeed. 

Mormontage

baptism— 
separation anxiety 
immergency 

Allelujah

When the semicircle is complete, 
each pedestal placed aesthetically 
on stage, the girls enter. 
Thirty earnest seraphs 

Long Distance

So now you sit with a black eye 
by a glass wall on the sixteenth floor. 
Already I see our talk in paragraphs 
I can’t read, topics in the margin, 
one clear sentence about clutter. 

At Fifty-Five

Was he improving, 
or just too tired to sin? 

Regardless, it was pretty clear 
that where his broken heart and contrite

Alder and Maple in Molting

Leaves 
rusted and dry 
fall to the earth 

Creations: Mississippi

Adam, I know, 
came from this red clay. 

I am ever created 
of dust.

Multiply and Replenish

Adam’s sperm number 
one hundred million per cubic centimeter,
hope he can comply with God’s command. 

Sesquicentennial Pioneer Commemoration Speech

My grandpa Walker Reynolds was a pioneer, too, with a Brigham beard.
Mom says he loved pickles, and dancing music. 
Last time we saw him, Grandma said, “It’s time to hug goodbye,”
and all I could think is how Grandpa’s 

Soft Sculpture

I sink into a beanbag chair 
shaped like a giant ear 
but changing shape to fit my rear 

Basic Training

We were like filings, lifted straight 
As though a magnet stiffened up 
Our figures like the hair upon 
Our closely cropped skulls. But we, 

She and He: Alternatives

—Or on summer evenings as the sky 
Draws down its light, prodding the question why 

They sit in cast-off wicker furniture, 
The kids cross-legged as though the lawn made a shore

Lectures on Death at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

The ranger stoops to toss a stick away 
and points to a narrow hole dug in the mud. 
“Snakes,” she says, “are plentiful this year; 
there’s some bubonic plague in rodents here.” 

On the Fringe — The Singles’ Ward (The Appeal of the Foyer)

The quick exit— 
Space, windows, safety. 
Cozy couches and easy 
Chairs versus the hard 

Widow’s Weeds

Black 
is the absence of color 
to which the eye adjusts. 
Black magnifies the face of 
the beloved. 

Thistle Field

So speaks King Saul: 
I want this modest man of war
David, dead. 
Snare him with a string 

Straight Up

Shirley is the punch line who holds the joke 
while we wait like pieces on a game board 
in the line that wanders 
from the classrooms, through the halls, 

Miguel

I meet Miguel 
bear hugging him from behind 
tense tendons in his neck 
rage squeezing out his eyes: 

One Method of Hope

The only motion here is an old 
Dodge pickup leading a coil 
of white exhaust across 
the horizon—a snow-dusted 

Lucifer’s Obit.

            We note, today, the passing 
of our most dreared departed— 
father of lies, child of perdition, 
mother of woes, and friend to sin. 

Begotten of the Ash

Born of the ash, 
Bloom of the dust 
Fires of the soul, 
Colors of rust 

Joseph Loved His Women

Joseph loved his women 
beginning with strong Lucy 
who prayed him back to health. 
He loved his sister Sophronia, 

To a Cymbidium Orchid Blooming on December 25th

You must have burst surprised 
thrusting up your single spear 
so soon past All 
Hallow’s-Eve 

Fashion Show

Did she think, “Depression,” 
            As banks collapsed, 
Men took to the road, farms 
            Reclaimed and lost? 

Ordinary Light

One hour of a particular day, 
like a sudden flu it descends upon you 
the first time. 
You could not have known. 

Fact of my life

My job was once threatened if I published a poem.
I lived in another place 
but in America and knew my rights. 
I let the poem wait. Oh, I read it aloud once

We Write What We Want to Know

I want to know why water has the right of way
where God dwells near zenith or nadir 
why you see stars better peripherally 
why some people have a fear of trees 

My Father Comes to Me

My father comes to me 
his hand scrapes on the door 
that he opens to this bedroom where I am still, 
not sleeping but waiting for his hair oil scent to reach me.

To a College Friend Killed by a Drunk Driver

In those days 
we all wanted a man 
to cover our shame, the nakedness 
of being a woman alone. 
A degree yes unless 
The Knight came 

Drama Queen

The week they turn off your phone, 
I wait in your car while you give quarters 
to a pay phone mounted on red brick 
at a convenience store. 

Night Fires

Family sentinels, we watch flames grab scrub oak
roughly on the shoulder of our dysphoric mountain,
shiver as three firs’ tired arms collapse in slow motion
silence. 

Women are the Keepers of Secrets

Women keep the secrets of men 
by candlelight and telephone, 
growing in their wombs. 

A Name and a Blessing

I raise you my just born daughter 
to the Father of All Lights. 
He has set a flame in you; 
this fire connects you to the trees 
the earth and creeping things. 

Luke 7:37

The alpha and omega sat at meat. 
The woman could not speak. She only knelt 
And wept. Translucent tears upon his feet 
Flowed like river waters to the Delta. 

Courting

I. Prayer 

Bless us as we try to find 
ourselves, 
each other.

If the Din of Cities Makes the Moon

If the din of cities makes the moon 
shine dimly in the night; 
if the touch of concrete and tin 
drowns the sound of water; 

Dragging Fanny

Her last hymn in the book—and they’re dragging it.
Behold, her royal army’s old. Band of stragglers,
banners furled, tired voices buckling the pews. 

Afterward

Once on the porch I asked 
great-grandfather Porter a question 
loudly and he said wait 
though he was just sitting still 
his face raised to low sun 
eyes half-open 

Above the Estuary (Before the trail closure through Cascade Preserve)

The river’s long curve 
enters the bay in streak between meadow 
and forest—algae green of freshwater, 
kelp green of salt. 

Metaphysics over lunch

English professor and rebel: 
Off campus, our sentences race 
the tabletop, garbed in wit and color. 
By the time food comes, our ideas dance 

Caught Gull, Plowing

At five, standing at the edge of the field, 
Dad up there on the great green Deere, 
I must have been scared he’d leave. 
He made me an offer: Catch me a seagull 

Companionship

We’d had problems, especially lately: 
Just last week I snapped at him 
and found myself staring into the outraged eyes 
of a former national rugby star, his one fist 

Clay

On the sill, torsos wrenched out of clay 
still bore the sculptor’s mark, the print 

of cocked thumb and nail. Tortured, vaguely
female, they shamed us. We crowded in,

The First Christmas Eve at Home

The air above my parents’ roof is cold. 
It pushes smoke back down the chimney, 
forcing me to turn off the fire alarm 
and open both windows. 

Practicing at Sunrise

In the morning’s glissando, 
Canadian night wrapped tightly 
against opaque windows, 
she rises. The brick in her bed 

Natural Symmetry

The restaurant juts above the pond, 
casting lucent shadows in those moments 
that fall still between dinner and dark. 
Reflections luminesce against the faces 

Night Thunder at the Cabin

In thunder at 2 a.m. 
I occupy all my lives 
my loves hovering holding 
rising with me to the wild night 

Military Funeral in a High Hills Cemetery

An adulterous generation after all. 
We seek a sign, some old tune or rhyme 
Like Grandfather’s Clock, even as we stand
Among the tumbling chaos of death and birth

Day Music

The mountain is a redhead 
lying on his back 
nose and knees pointed 
to the sun. His hair 

Wild Things

I’ve heard of horses—mustangs mostly—who run wild across Nevada’s
bleak terrain. (They kind of remind me of Uncle Bill, who ran wild, too, last
summer, until Aunt Shirley caught up with him at the border). Horses know
no borders, don’t allow limits, except those imposed by a weariness of

Plain and Simple

It could have been an impossible day. 

And then the wind 
helping the Gardener’s Eden keep its promise:
the outdoor ornaments

Temple Square — Past and Present

Past 

Through iron gates shine 
Bronze doors never opened—Holiness to the Lord. 
Sun, moon, and stars live in granite, 
Carved by dead ancestors

Reclamation

The Oquirrh Mountains form a finger of land 
which rests its tip in the Great Salt Lake. Slopes 
behind alfalfa gently rise until they stop 
where the motion of ancient waves left benches of sand.

Grandma Comes for Me

Out of Sunday morning dark 
My grandma came for me. 

Stripped bare to dreaming I saw 
Her occupy the fat black leather rocker

Thin Ice

I watch two girls on wheels. 
Four neon-green wheels 
on each foot. Rollers 

Fertility

On your twelfth birthday, 
the day you found a kinship with the moon and tides,
you sat on the front steps as a great burlap ball
rolled in its place secured and shimmering— 
an olive tree. 

Naked

They’d come from practice at the gym, 
their hair steaming, 
and in the flirt and banter 
would reach inside my girlfriend’s car 

Hop Hornbeam

In the Sacred Grove 
near Palmyra, New York, 
there’s hardly a tree 
old enough to have been 

From Under Ground

From under ground 
you can hear them stomp, 
a chaotic cacophony 
amplified by mud and bone, 

Planting Day

Behind the weathered barn, I crouch 
among burlap bags full of this year’s 
seed. These kernels promise before 
they prove, and I have no choice 

Trajectory at the End of Winter

Back from a walk along the Big Wood River in early May 

I am the river alive with spring run-off 
one moment rushing to be where the calling calls, 
the next a pool reflecting or an eddy at play.

Russell

You’d been the one taken out and talked to during stories of Jesus.
On the scuffed pew you stuffed the blessed bread 
in your mouth and blew it out, laughing. 
So when they found you in blood at the foot of the stairs,

Jesus Lost

Do you know this picture, asks
the magazine. Yes, I’ve seen
this man before. I’m sure 
that clean, bronze brow, those
dark eyes’ intensity surprised

Through a Glass Darkly

In their projected restoration, contractors 
pulled down aging plywood, discreetly 
placed to hide remnants of the stained-glass 
window shattered in the fifties by a bevy 

Under the Faultline

The night before, the earth had jolted us, 
A ripple in our sleep till Dad called it 
A quake and brought to life the massive plates
Beneath us gnashing the ages. It was 

The Basic Tune of the Sparrow

Outside the glass that keeps us warm, 
the sparrows, 
most common of creatures, 
of whom the promise is made 

The Charity of Silence

This is the story of my father’s demise. It wanders when I tell it, and I never know when to bring in the polygamy, so I just do and let matters take care of themselves.…

The By-pass

If I looked up the road from the irrigation ditch, I could see the church house bumping stiff and dark against the sunset’s blaze. “The old church house/’ people called it now. “The old churchhouse,”…

Salt Lake Citations

A friend writes: In a walking excursion last fall through the old block lying between Fifth and Sixth East, Seventh and Eight South—in a narrow alley behind Charon’s Mexican Bakery—I came across a shop of…

Thin Ice

I watch two girls on wheels. 
Four neon-green wheels 
on each foot. Rollers 

Emma’s Anguish

Joseph, Joseph, 
            How has the night persuaded you? 
What bed but this? 
What arms but mine? 

Joseph to Emma

Out of the night of holy election, 
Out of the silence, the eloquent silence 
Only believing whispers to me: 
Follow the guiding of soul-felt selection, 

Winter Dies

The full third moon of passing 
winter rears up 
against an x-ray white orchard. 
There are tree skeletons. 

Indian Summer

If, when September rolls over in the gutter, 
picks himself up and stumbles off 
in search of a restroom, coffee and eggs, 
you pull back the drapes and slide open the window,
he will disregard the screen and make himself your guest. 

Pah Tempe

After another day hiking the desert,
I lock the door of my car,
and turn toward the hot springs
in the cool night.

Parched

Measured teaspoons of salt. 
Sifted flour, dustbowl flour. 
It gulps and swallows water. 
I feel it splinter off my hands, 

In Riverdale

We returned to our beginnings 
            in August, with its crayola green 
            trees and grass, blue sky, 
and yellow light so certainly imposed 

In a Pueblo Indian Dwelling, Four-Corners

            Beside 
shards of earthen jars and bowls, 
the Kachina-Child returns 
in the desert’s smoldering gaze. He enters 

Anhedonia

He said, “She said it means
Unable to have pleasure,
Unable to find it anywhere.
She put me on Zoloft to help.”

Learning to Disappear

They say there is a Buddha 
                        In each grain of sand 

We begin huge and rigid. Life grinds 
away at us. We grind against one another.

Sensing Spirits

We had to fly to her brother’s wedding. 
But she lay prone on a heating pad, 
the room spinning above, and her 
weight and blood pressure each 

An Act of Faith

Flat, oval galaxies float—indeterminately 
Distant yet distinct—above. . .glimmer and prepare
To fade into determinate darkness. 

Maps of Time

We inch forward on hearsay, 
rumors, and puffs of wind, 
working the ancient arts 
of dead reckoning, stars, 

Commonplace Nightmares

Most likely it was an act of God that 
the cathedral caught fire even before 
the hangman put the mask on my head 
and all my executioners ran in search of water 

History of the Church — Part One

I feel grace descend like whiskey-scented 
oil poured over me in the upper room on 
my way to heaven. I dance in the heat of 
a fire, like ghosts following Sitting Bull 

Coming Home

I see you in the glass. 
Welcome home! 
Hard to believe 
You are a man 

Love is a Delicate Chain

Here, the heavy brown ones from your father’s coat,
there the ladybugs from Jari’s first grade dress,
and from your birthday shirt, five urgent reds.
You, sorting the buttons while I sewed. 

Being World

I am invidious of mothers’ rubber air 
Connecting them to baby. How they walk 
With young on hip, the way the baby turns and

About my Conversion: Directions to a Nonbeliever

Run your finger across the arc of my cheekbone.
Notice how it curves like the hull of Noah’s ark
that propelled life through earth’s watery death. 

Forever Family

Five of his and four of hers were 
step-this-and-that to each other. 

The Church said, “Families Are 
‘Forever'”—in their case it was more

Plenty: A Morning Poem at 75

You do not have to do it again 
any of it. Only if you care to. 

You do not have to hold onto being anyone, anywhere.
Enough is more than plenty.

Spiritualizing the Organic

The garden heaves with what does not belong—
plastics, agent orange, rubber cement, land mines
that won’t biodegrade, disintegrating corpse
bones, sanded into earth by worms 

In the Kitchen on a Saturday Morning

Three men 
in a circumference of scant sentences, 
slow dull sounds 
trade expertise, 

Lament for My Eyes in a Mirror

I am Ron involved in me now Norma’s gone. 
Norma knew me more than my mind only. 
I know me only in eyes gone dead as mirrors. 
More than I Norma knew me in my eyes. 

The Handing

—for Beth Rich 

She was seventy-one, moving on. Her five-foot-two 
leukemia-lessened to eighty pounds, only 
her hands the same, large, fanned storehouse of comfort, her
vitaligo, the brown pattern of taking on 
the sun to map the journeys:

Proud Flesh

Dad doctors Rudy’s leg, 
torn and jagged 
just above the hoof 
enmeshed in barbed wire. 

The Rose Jar

Musky as the cedar drawer 
in Grandmas’ standing metal trunk, 

a genie scent, improbable and 
distant as the sound of hooves on sand

Out in the Shop: In Memory of Grandpa

The sun shines a triangle through the hazed glass 
of the shop door, spotlighting the eternal snow of dust
falling and collecting, as if by magnetic force, 
on drill bits, saw blades, and boxes of nails. 

Encounter

Absently, I opened the medicine cabinet 
in my folks’ house (searching for a comb), 
then stood stunned as you wafted out 
like a genie, so generous with cologne 

Balsamic Vinegar

I didn’t go for vinegar
but for the smell of life
for organic tomatoes
not mall tomatoes of feldspar
or other inorganic stuff

Wedding Vows

My fears awakened 
when I touched you, sacrificial, 
kneeling at the altar 
extending your hands, 
beckoning to be destroyed 
ceremoniously. 

Without Question

Did you ever start to think 
what happens to saliva while you sleep? 
Don’t. 

Eve’s Psalm

My fingers, like God’s fingers, 
point to the dawn of salvation. 
I clasp this pomegranate, its seeds like 
worlds extending our isolated existence. 

Aspiration

Wind, shorn from the sky by glass 
and concrete, whistles down the face
of the casino tower, flings the naked
branches of a sidewalk tree, and pours

Sestina of the Martyrdom

On the long tether of a day in June 
Beyond the Zion swamps, the prisoned palms
Of four men opened toward a promised land.
And yet, below the shadows of limestone 
Joseph thought again, I am going 
Like a lamb to the slaughter. 

On a Morning After New Snow and a Winter of Healing Inside

Out there in the yard 
            winter drips silver 
            and bombardiers through branches its excesses 
                        of yesterday. White. 

The Passing Lane

Through the glow 
of dashboard lights 
reflected in the glass, 
I watch a plow drop its blade 
and scrape the ice, 
knicking the blacktop. 

Miracle of Wood

—that wood could come in 
that thin and blonde 
for kindling 
after the dark bark, 
after the ax whack 
and the crack 
of white opening, 
the stria of wood 
gouging, indenting 
my armloaded skin 

Christmas Card from Siple Station, Antarctica

Awake all night where no night conies 
she trasmits waves into the sky 
from sixty feet beneath snow. 
Some arc into the solar winds 

Syllabus

Astronomy
The earth
Or sky wobbles,
We don’t know which

Remuneration

The price is higher than he expects 
he smiles, wondering if it 
has something to do with the new 
black fishnets 

Water Will

In that first summer before a town was 
(Only tents and wagonbeds), they tossed
Pails of water over the sun-scorched canvas. 

Trouble in Eternity

The trouble is in eternity, the Angels say, 
Where my Mormon husband twenty years
Divorced believes in his sleep that we 
Are married still. Always he is sleeping 

Nobody’s Grandpa

He paid the three-twenty 
three and slipped the familiar 
red and white box into 
his jacket pocket. 

The Empty Cistern

Silence and grace, 
the only words I know 
in either of their languages, 
so I don’t say much. 

Disrobed

The moment that I cannot comprehend 
is when you took your garments off. 

I wonder (though I don’t quite want to know) 
whether, when the moment came, 
it was conscious or was incidental.

I Add Craig to My Prayers

All bones, nose, and trouble. 
It hasn’t been a year 
since he burned the tool shed down 
then crouched, crying, at the back 
of the garden while firemen watered 
the high whipping flames. 

Gardner’s Song

The tomb was a mouth 
that knew one note: grief. 
The rock lips opened, 
closed: tight as a safe. 

Red’s Tire Barn Titans

They are overmatched from the beginning. 
Even the black block numbers on their backs
seem to loom on the jerseys that hang slack 
and flap about their narrow bodies, smooth

Archaeopteryx

Quarry workmen slice open the past,
pry limestone chunks with picks, 
shave each delicate layer 
with a chisel and a sledge. 

Night Light

With a neighbor who couldn’t tolerate light, 
I took stairs in the dark, 
felt for knobs and shapes 
of cabinets in windowless rooms. At home, 

Childhood Homes

“A crackerbox,” my mother called it, 
            Her marriage’s first scene. 
My first home, my brother’s, tucked 
            Far back for remembering, 
The place where she dyed feedsacks 
            To curtain the windowscreens. 

Vicarious

For and in behalf of those dead 
before God’s love could smother 
them. I enter the font and take a baptism. 
Buried in the temple’s basement, twelve 
garlanded oxen balance the precarious 

Liahona

After he was let go, Dad’s job 
was changing the rolls on those 
little spindles in the bathrooms. 

Christian Spinning

My son who is blue-eyed and sensitive
thinks he’s alone in his room 
where his music bumps and heaves. 
I stand unseen at the door which is open

Listening to the Lord

A rare treat in Manila—real grass, 
short and green, probing tentatively 
out of rich soil. The sky 
waits to rain—black clouds 

Breach Birth: Aug. 20, 1891

He is born breach, meaning gap. 
From the beginning 
he was negative space 
a blue cast shadow, 

Utah Territory, 1893

A washed cup, 
folded socks, 
three unworn shirts 
with no scent of him. 
Smooth bedsheets, 
dry towels. 

Delineation

October snow brings the hunters 
down from the mountains 
without their kill. Sometimes 
it happens this way. Sumac and oak 

Alive in Mormon Poetry

The summer 2002 edition of Irreanteum: Exploring Mormon Literature is de voted to the theme of environmental writing in LDS theology and culture. It features poems solicited by guest editor Todd Petersen by several contemporary…

Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture

When the above notice appeared in the Improvement Era in September 1933, it did not seem out of place in a publication intended for the general church membership. In the same issue of the Improvement Era, Theodore E. Curtis posted a notice for another collection of poetry. Its announcement included endorsements from notable leaders of the church: 

The Woman of Christlike Love

Into her brownies she sifts sunshine 
into a day she irons the clear scent of giving. 

Almost Pentecostal

Mrs. Robinson sang in the choir. 
            In the church, my face, my husband’s, 
            and one other white couple on the stage. 

A Motherless House

I live in a Motherless house,
A broken home. 
How it happened I cannot learn. 

The Middle Path, Colorized

The usual iconography failed me. 
My mother thumb-tacked 
a cardboard print above my crib; 
my age of reason came early. 

We Were Not Consulted

We couldn’t say 
            the yes that would loosen 
                        our grip, tutoring us 
            in doing without. 
Some things were simply snatched away. 

The Right Place

Not one has made it. 
Trout launch out of Snake Creek, 
flipping through the air, 
vaulting up the waterfall, 

Night Work Near Escalante

After dawn we hike through fine rain, 
but the light is good, only slight 
cellophane distortion as we look through 
at trees and stream, box canyon walls 

You Owe Me

There’s a foul wind blowing in from ten o’clock
Saying, You owe me. I check my balance books,
And they don’t look off, but the wind insists,
You owe me. What? I ask. You abandoned me. 

Antler People v. Womb People

The antler people have ways of finding 
The womb people’s poles and knocking 
Them to the ground, if only in the mind. 
The womb people bare their breasts 

Contralto

In the interval after the mastectomy 
before her head was a slick white egg, 
she would color the gray roots of her dark 
blanket-soft hair with drugstore dye. 

The Mothers’ Antlers

The mothers have antlers of their own, the eldest 
Mother shall lead the rest, show them 
How to do with food first of all, house is next, 
And training young the last. The Mothers train 

Inheritance

I wear her name 
and a two carat diamond 
which, like a heavy rock of salt, 
falls to the side between my fingers. 
I’m sitting on a pink velvet chair 

Nothing We Needed to Know

And then, to show how it was done, 
Mrs. Jackson, the Home Ec. teacher, 
bent from the waist, the way you drink from a tap,
and demonstrated how to let the breasts 

Cargoes II

Tanker from al-Kuwayt on the Persian Gulf 
Passes the Straits of Hormuz (which Americans hold), 
With a cargo of “black gold”— 
Gas and petroleum— 
For further refinement in Galveston. 

War Bride

She pictures heavy boots, plodding through sand, 
and wonders if the socks she knitted fit him. 
In sundown-smoky Baghdad, her Marine digs trenches, 
longing for double beds and salt-rimmed tequilas, 

The Cedars of Lebanon

Across a shattered street, a Muslim groom lifts 
the train of his Christian bride as he steps over 
broken glass, old tires, and miles of rubblestone. 
Her face, a dark rose, is the only beauty 
in this ravaged landscape. 

Aladdin’s Lamp, March 4, 2003: on the eve of first strike in Iraq

Out of a dream 
a fragrance overwhelms me: 
not saffron, not lavender 
but something in between: 

Movement: Out of Doors, Out of Town, In Dangerous Times

To that lit spot ahead 
is as far as you’ll walk: 
open green, bounded by pale shrubs 
you can’t name, sky 
in clabbery cloud, light blue showing through. 
Storm coming, your father would say. 

Gene, My Eternal Brother*

Speak now in the voice of peace. 
The poets of the world are rising, 
rising against the storm. 
Speak in your poet’s voice, 

Blind Tears

From that first dark day 
the Khmer Rouge, 
a scourge of scarlet locusts, 

Heart Mountain

At the Japanese American National Museum
a pile of small stones, most 
no bigger than my thumb, each 
with a single kanji, 

Resurrection

What if the Resurrection were not pent 
for the vast reendowment of all flesh 
but occurred as if by chance, like birth 
(that miraculous appointment), and just 
as unnoticed. What if these were the terms?: 

Yahrzeit

This morning I light red candles 
and set them on the sill, 
daring the breeze 
through an open window 
to tease the flames. 

The Meadow

My family and I drove hours one Sunday to see 
a meadow in the mountains of Arizona. We stood 
behind a split-rail fence. “It’s beautiful,” 
my dad said. “It’s for sale. If we had money 
we’d buy it.” And we climbed the fence 
and wandered that acre of wildflowers and ferns, 
ate fried chicken and picked up our litter, 
and went home. 

Eve’s Offering

Sacred, subtle slavery, the mother’s task 
That burden of creation’s holy power. 
To love a clot of flesh and never ask 
If it deserves its soul at chosen hour. 

Afield

Just off the highway 
in the setting sun 
cattle gather on a hill. 
My foot lets up 

Death to the Death of Poetry! The Art Is Alive and Kicking in Mormon Circles — and in Mainstream American Culture

When I read Robert Hughes’s essay, “Poetry Matters in Mormon Culture,” published in a recent Dialogue,[1] I didn’t feel an overwhelming need to respond. But like a sliver that goes at first unnoticed and later…

November 2001

You notice the smells first, more spring, or
even summer, than late fall, the stale-clean
scent of wet sunlit streets after last night’s 
heavy rain, the musk of soaked dead leaves,

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1999

Soft summer wind lifts girls’ sheer dresses into wings,
Pinks, reds, and golds winking and rippling through the air
Like babies cooing far away. 
They pose round-faced and porcelain 

The Riverbank, Late Winter: Living North

A lined calendar of empty trees 
turns the cold 
consolable. Even light this dim 
is an invitation. 

The Fall of My Fiftieth Year

Winter already edging down 
from mountain passes, I walk past 
our first town cemetery, filled with upright 
markers and gold-red trees. 
It’s had no vacancies for years. 

Eighteen Thousand Sundowns

Near a rock slope of hill pasture, 
grass grows up through a few old bones. 
Again, what’s moved past recall 
is not past pain. White as the noon-day 

Reading into Dusk

On the wood porch I awake 
to no sound, but a sense of some change: 
light falls across an arm and 
I pull back into darkness. 

#939: Ambulance Unit

‘Say goodbye to all 
this bluddled nonsense on earth: 
simple rot inside 
a coffin’s a better life. 
I’m now more trouble than I’m 

#1071: The Banality of Evil

Had I been a German in those Thirties, 
I should have joined the Party: 
I should have gone with the rest. 
I should have condoned the persecution of the Jews. 

Prayer for a Grandchild

Let bells come 
            from porches and throats 
of brown cows, 

Baptism

The old man bent and balding 
is lowered into the water. 
At that small moment of burial 
he remembers his mother, thinks 

El Cordero de Dios

Driving from Hollister to Santa Cruz late morning, I
stop at San Juan Bautista to grab a sandwich. 
All the signs point toward the Mission, so I keep driving.
Brown-skinned Mexican kids swirl around the plaza

A Spinster Physician Weeps While Speaking Her Sermon on Abstinence: A Sonnet without Rhyme

In her fiftieth year and all these other 
smug and satisfied people’s children 
gaping faces from the pews like ripe pears 
and what can she say—a professional woman, 

Triptych-History of the Church

I feel grace descend like whiskey-scented 
oil poured over me in the upper room on 
my way to heaven. I dance in the heat of 
a fire, like ghosts following Sitting Bull 

Martin in Me

Three times I take his words into my mouth 
and make them thunder from my tongue. 
His final speech will not remain unsung in me. 

Confession

The trees wear 
            copper-lit skin tonight. 
Spread out and still in the cold, 
they look like slender Kenyans 
                        holding up thousands of hands, 

Thousand Springs

It snowed yesterday for a moment
            but it was an idea 
                        that didn’t catch on — 

Sorrow and Song

That morning you came to me 
I saw the lamp arising in your beard, 
a flash of solder and fire 
wisping in your robes and hair 

Women in a Time Warp | Sheree Maxwell Bench and Susan Elizabeth Howe, eds., Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women

Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women is a slim publication attempting to represent two hundred years of poetry by Mormon women. The anthology is divided into sections that portray the stages of a…

Salad for Two

I sense someone beside me 
and see Emily’s eyes on my hands 
and the knife in the sink. 
She asks, What are you slicing? 

The Good Shepherd

If I were the neighborhood bishop 
There’d be lots of things I couldn’t really help with
No rolling up sleeves to fix Brother Nielsen’s car
No driving some new tractor to plow snow 

The Peach

Blake’s angel, for all his winks and nods,
Wouldn’t have it, though it hangs for having:
Drop of down and blush quavering on the rim
Of ripeness, playing at a fall. 

Family Tree

Adam: The wind hissed in the branches, 
green tongues 
whispering 
a secret I could 
never peel open. 

Faith Healing

And there she was, Kathryn Kuhlman* strolling the stage at the Civic,
parting a sea of applause, her gown like an angel that got away,
so pure it might have been empty but for the Holy Ghost preening
in her body as she paced the floral proscenium, lifting her hands
in a sign language I knew only God understood. 

Churchgoers

My brother dumps raw
sugar into his 
mouth from a small 
plastic tube he hides 

The Orchid Grower

He sought to grow rare orchids up bright air 
On theory they were closer to the sun. 
Such trailing gardens of the blue compare 
To virga with refractions overrun. 

Triple A’s

He himself is the present he is wrapping 
under the starlit branches of the sky. 
This, of course, is a truth that needs no trapping: 
it is apparent to the naked eye. 

The Elect

The righteous pagans cursed our easy grace.
We shrugged and smiled and knew salvation well.
Looking our wounded savior in the face,
the righteous pagans cursed our easy grace.

Scriptum Est

He read us stories from a book as blank
as a white sky. (He couldn’t read the sky,
however.) Words marched forward, rank on rank:
he read us stories from a book as blank

My Brother’s Bed

To wake up remembering his empty bed 
is serene as touching the walls of a cave, 
is to believe you can keep that Friday in mind 
and heft Galilee on your back. 

My Brother Was Buried Wearing a Red Jacket

Walking up to the coffin 
(a little larger than a viola case), 
I see his jacket lying stiff 
as baseball card gum. 

Brooklyn: City of Churches

At the OTB, men “cross” themselves 
as their horses race across TV screens 
double-checking their stubs 
before dropping them on the floor 

Old Rodeo Man

The ground is an absolute, the air lets 
you down. The way you leave your bronc sustains 
a conspiracy of violence you embrace 
the way you mean an oath. Forever. 

Carol Took the Call

Al had tethered me to the class of 53, 
webbed me to classmates before the web, 
invited me back every ten years. 

Everlasting

Every bride asks herself, What if 
he doesn’t show up? What then? 

Bliss

I trace my past life through hairdos: ringlets, 
pigtails, finger waves, straightened-on-juice-cans,
bouffant, French braids, and—worst—sausage rolls
flying back from my face like ditsy, exuberant wings. 

The Holding Room

In a plowed field at the rim 
of the southern Utah desert 
one of those Schnebbley brothers 

Guest Room

Our children were conceived 
            in a carved maple bed sent 
from Milwaukee on the train 
            by my husband’s grandmother in 1937. 

Sheep Ranch Near Hillspring

She never speaks to him anymore. Her tongue
is as bone-dry as an irrigation ditch in winter, 
her ankles grimy as a crooked ewe’s. Dribbled 
wine and spots of sour milk stain her blouse, 
and now his lead sheep has given up the bell. 

On Reading a Blank Page

I once sat on a plateau’s edge 
It began on my back, with updrafts. 
They rose along the white escarpment 

Jonah in the Belly

So this is how you’ll preserve 
me, Lord? in a slosh of brine? 
Go ahead, though I’ve borne no fruit, torn 
loose from my roots and gone my own way. 

Christmas Carol (Post-Christmas: 2005)

As though he were sculpted there, so still
is the only Shama thrush of the winter
dripping melody among dropping needles
high in this raining forest of ironwoods 

Washing Mother

I return for the washing. 
Can’t resist your need, 
Or else I want to atone 
For leaving so eagerly 
Without glancing back, 
Back when you were whole and lively
And wanting to hold me tight. 

Tonkas

the real M.A.S.H fiction 
forests colonials raped 
harsh llbon-nohm-dil 
Hankuk and Chosun were bald 
all native trees Japan burned 

Fruit

First 
“She’s like an apple 
in a water balloon,” 
the doctor says. They watch 

Orisons

Raw-tipped branches
freeze and unflutter.
Chafed knuckles wince
to bud wadeable leaves,
homesick mulch. 

Mouths

We’ve left your mother to sleep alone,
no mouth or hand at breast, 
free to dream and sleep alone 

Summer Dam

After spring snowmelt from Ephraim Canyon 
where Grandpa ran his eighty head in summer, 
the creek slowed and eased its crippled way 
down over gravel and stones, 

Upon the Face of the Water

The chokecherry where we camped one June 
hung low over the water, sheltering 
brown shade beneath its branches 
so clear the water revealed crooks in our legs 

Reflections on Darkness and Light

All that has gone before makes the now, somehow.
Whys are sucked deep into the darkened spirit’s
black hole where desperate reaching retrieves 
distraught questions from God’s battered children.
Response comes in increments, 
not yes or no, butmaybe, no matter, not yet. 

Where Are the Horses?

I have awakened him from a deep sleep 
slumped over in his blue vinyl and chrome wheelchair 

and wrenched him from a scene 
of young riders and sweating horses

Compass

In the simmer and slow furnace 
of morning, the ball sits on the ground 
rotund as pomegranate, a misshapen 

Graduation

As morning breaks, our daughter, 
wearing her best blue dress, is too excited to eat. 
The wasted Cheerios bob like buoys in her bowl. 

poetry on the ‘fridge door

my mother is madly licking 
at the languid red peach, 
screaming at life and 
the rust crush of death. 

Showshoe Song

flung unsifted from bluest above 
snow casts light on me in sparks 
Behold all ye that kindle fire 
That compass yourselves about with sparks 

Borax

The sand that blows along the bed 
of the Amargosa waves and shirrs 
and cleans as well as water. It scours 
the tatters left uneaten by birds, 

Dining with the Devil | R. A. Christmas, A Long Spoon: Poems

Over the past forty years, Robert Christmas has been one of the best and most consistent poets writing about Mormon life and culture. His distinctive style and voice are readily recognizable. What makes Christmas’s poetry…

Quantum Gospel: A Mormon Testimony

Symmetry exists in exact reflections of Love: 
Take a patch of chaos circling beforehand, 
Sling it past black stars circling at random, 
Create light in rings inside particled sparks, 
Glowing in random points and recognitions, 
Moving and brewing beneath your own hand.
Respond to Word of God inside your mind: 
Call the involvement creation, as the eyes 
Of the Gods gaze infinity into finite forms. 

At the End of the Street Lies the Sky

At the end of the street lies the sky 
dressed in the purple magician’s robe 
of eventide and the winter storm. 
Tonight she sculpts stairs of ice and 

Sonnet to Japanese Spring

Spring has come to old Nippon! 
Standing on a hill I see 
Verdant valleys neatly sown, 
Stepped and terraced, and a bee 

Black Handkerchief

Lying on the table, 
he was as handsome 
as the day he had taken her 
through the veil. 

Wedding Flower

Her body was cold, nearly 
frigid in the room 
set aside for such matters. 

After My Brother’s Remission

When dawn comes this early, 
a slice of sky visible from my bed 
textures waking. Today’s thin layers clabber 
white . . .

Some with Shadows

A day of long-walked silences, 
waterless red gullies and hard-rock 
plateaus. We’ve met few on the trails 
this summer past my father’s dying. 

While Planting Hollyhocks

In the dim green 
I can’t tell what I’m remembering, 
or what’s been handed down. . . .

Yorick

A cold spell 
for my desecration 
slipped upward from your grave. 

The Clearing

Spring again. 
The browns, the ochre, 
the brittle death of fall and winter 
recast in transcendent greens— 
            vibrant, transparent, resurgent. 

I Teach Six-Year-Olds about Jesus in Sunday School

A girl I’ve never met meets me at the door, 
whines at my leg until I hold her. Thin arms, 
thin mouth, a sour smell I overlook while fetching 
crayons, glue sticks, snacks. She lifts her dress, 
exposes the top of her baggy white tights, looks at me.
We both sing: “Faith is knowing the sun will rise…”
I sit next to her, tap her hands, whisper no. 

Hunter’s Visitation

Most of my life I’ve believed what these eyes see 
these hands can touch, 
that seeing and touching—being touched— 
ends when they nail the coffin lid on. 

Nephews

Their shovels grate rock and gravel to fill 
the grave she’d scoff empty of their grief— 
“Hey, guys, I’m with God!” she’d proclaim. 
“I’m not here, guys! I’m with Jeeeeezus, singing!”

Patriarchal Blessing

The boy, sixteen, is taller than his mother, taller than
the creaky man with shining eyes and trembling hands. 

To My Teacher

You light between tall trees, never trip 
on roots—and yet leave heavy footprints. 
Bounding toward the surf, you pause for me: 
together we will touch the sacred. 

Moving the Story, with Conviction: On the LDS Church and the Marriage Amendment

For them, 
there was no between 
they believed the tale 
and trekked to testify 
and walked and walked 

Land’s End 1997

The wind is simple 
a thing with pacific bite. 
Lifting foam tatters, cold. 

The Word

The Word was made Flesh 
and the Flesh made Words. 
He fed the Five Thousand 
on words shaped like loaves 

One Tree

Outside my window 
one lone dead tree 
is standing firm 
in brave desiccation 

Spring Variations on a Theme by Lorenzo Snow

As man, is God—once. 
Was—as God is man— 

Mechanical Failures

The old man shimminates and coughs 
along the shoulder of the road 
and veers like the wobble in the wheel 
that brought his Airstream to a stop. 

Three-Legged Dog

An old three-legged dog, 
whiskers whitening, coat black 
as the carbon of a starless winter night, 
slowly hobbyhorses along 
the cobblestone street near the 
park green and water blue of 
Gradina Cismgiu in graying Bucharest. 

A Proposal

When your snow melts, 
pick a late spring day, 
and wear your Levis. 

City of Brotherly Love

On the hottest of days 
in the sweltering summer of Philadelphia— 
when city streets sizzled like bacon with 
paved heat and the smothered air 

Beautiful Black Madonna of Czestochowa

They journey with hope 
of a blessing, a healing, a miracle of sorts 
for they have heard the stories told 
of old. 

Caught Up

John the Beloved considers the Rapture 

Word buckler, chary tribe, 
inured lamb,

Epithalamium

Good advice was of no use in the garden, 
reason only rudimentary in her 
who slouched toward the tree and took unflinching 
what was needed. 

Fidelity to Objects

The ponderous round oak table 
calls our family of ten 
to their places, 
the crowns of our heads 
like small planets 
stilled in orbit, 
mealtime settings like jewels 
in an expansive medallion. 

Necktie

Again he stands 
at the mirror 
and wants to jump 
into the waterfall 

Grace

I’m wedged between two lifetimes,
this one and that.
Like cement walls on either side,
they press close.

The Local Police Report

At sixteen, I’m listening 
to the sounds of a fractured frame house: 

my older sister sobbing 
over hard news 
about a religious leader she has long admired,

Jesus Was There

on the wall behind the choir chairs, 
and the ladies 
brushing the warm chapel air 
with round cardboard fans were there, 

Always with Us

Years later, at a high school reunion, 
a girl gave a tribute to a classmate who had died. 
Not knowing another way to end 
her remarks, she did so 
“in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.” 

Curious

Curious it is 
the simple means employed by God 
to bring great things to pass. 

Change

It’s coming on fall, 
time for a change, whispers the wind through the leaves. 

Man, dust

My holes remained whole 
at your arrival. 
I stood there, watching, impotent— 
cut the purple Nike rope, 

Multi-level Marketing

You may not appreciate this but 
I once ran into Hugh Nibley— 
at Smith’s market in Provo— 
you know, the guy who wrote all 

Glaucus

We can’t say what Glaucus knew 
From watching storms crush and reshape 
The surge, what voices he’d heard 
When the tide swelled onto the beach, 

One Tree Redux

Pierce the Veil

Salt Lake City Cemetary: Jewish Section

White Rain (forty years since our meeting)

Flying Out

What Rocks Know

Sober Child

Neshutan

A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal

Abba: The Name of God

Etching

On Losing My Cell Phone

Oceanography

Relinquishing

Gentle Dad

Self-Portrait as Burnt Offering

A Perfect World

The Man with One Foot Outside of Hell

Handmaid

Our First Home Has Forgotten Us

Contingency #4: White Out

From Outside the Settlement

Untitled

Sheets

the god of small things

Things Missed

Time Being

In this Version of Autumn

Sisyphus

Ripple Rock

The Leg

Internal Affairs

Blue Glass

Abracadabra

Bum Bam Boom

Flannel Board

Turncoat

Romance

An Apocalypse

Accidental Mystic

Marginalia

Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother

Mother Willow

Winterscape: Prairie

Seasonal Ritual

Easter Sermons

Gaius

Dishes

Intermission Wine

Sex Talk Sunday

Listening to My Parents Through the Ventilator Shaft

Blessing My Son

Vitae

Visible from Here

Dark Energy

Four Passes on Mount Horeb

Good Government in the City

Nazarín

San Diego Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints

The Afternoon Hour

Atlanta to Salt Lake

Revelation

After Her Stroke

Finding Place

Runaway

Mass Transit Madonna

Perplexed by the Revelator’s Heaven

Review: Tyler Chadwick, ed. Fire in the Pasture 21st-Century Mormon Poems

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference: Savior, silver, psalms, and sighs, and flash-burn offerings

“Epithalamion” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Fern Hill Revisited

Janie Goodmansen’s Reply

Sixth-Grade Broadway Revue

Inaccuracy

Hobble Creek Almanac

Graphene

A Short Poem about Nearly Everything

In Those Days of My Spirit: A Found Poem

Same-Sex Attraction

Blessed Virgin

This Dock My Home

Fractals

Ghazal

The Feather Pen

Glazier

Offerings

Singing in the Easter Choir beside My Enemy

Puzzled

Emptying Pockets

Beyond (on the Beach)

The Hosanna Shout

Sabbath Baptism

Melancholia

Easter

Trying to Keep Quiet: A Poem Constructed Around Fragments of Leslie Norris’s “Borders”

IRRELEVANT—RELEVANT

For Margene

About Half

evidence of things not seen

Jungle Walks

What Kind of Truth Is Beauty?: A Meditation on Keats, Job, and Scriptural Poetry

Shade

Evenings in October

Not Far Off Trail, Late Summer

Crow Games

Haiku for the Cat

Blood Cries

Oblation

Faith

Let Rocks Their Silence Break

Review: When Good is Better than Great: Susan Elizabeth Howe’s Salt Susan Elizabeth Howe. Salt: Poems

Review: Job: A Useful Reading Michael Austin. Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poems