Poems
From This Desert
A hollow in the nubbed lacework of seconds,
this singular moment, centuries’ lens
that has focused you here,
a beginning in the breathturn,
a shifting of silence toward word
across the texture of bone, dry taste of earth
in the mouth of address, air
caught in that throat knots against itself unknotting
to find the speech that opens,
spindly with longing—
So, speak.
Speak now.
A Lost Soul Speaks
Is it fair that every dawn and sunset
an old crow the earth’s rotation
has near worn down to a sparrow
unfolds his speech
in so many black leaves
from the peak of my house
to make a new sky?
Sometimes the day is dark.
Some evenings stagger
with foamy lights.
At midnight, I tear
a hole in the sky
and peek at God, there,
where he flaps and caws.
Our Steps Untangled Rags of Shadow
then the clearing
where a pond
looks at the sky,
as if the soil thinks
of clouds, dreams
that a hawk
reborn from shards of light
hunts tadpoles
as round as balloons.