I again realize that mindfulness is noticingstillness, how the ink on my paper has more than one color of black and feels fluid as silk. And how the hard plastic wheelsof a stroller across the street, scraps the gravel, making soundslike crackling embers. It’s noticing the stillness of a solitary pine needle pulsing in the sighing wind. An […]
reflection
As Benedictines
We see a single incandescent light beneath the pond,a flash at the bottom of four stemmed glasses, as if we were still in the Orleanais,where sins are garnished with clams and stewed in the finest vichyssoise.
Stormy Night
There is a loneliness to hail dropson a tin-roofed cabin. The woods and flowers and secrets ofmountains are lonely. So are the trails, ponds, and bridges; the vanished sources looking for a beginning. Dripping drops a million years in the making. Falling asleep in the wounded soil of dreams.
When Film Took More Than Time
I found this pictureof myself when Iwas less than a year old-September 1981 – in my mother’s arms, wading near a beach on the American side of the St. Lawrence River.She held me by my pits with a smile good enough to getmy father’s attention.
Like Raindrops
I am not a Buddhist (neither was he) I am a followerof the neonlight of liberation Free of being rightI strive to see how my poetry can hold many truths, all of them sentenced todeath
The Earth Is An Ordinary Friend
the oughtness of an ant&the secret codes of Hawthorn trees The way Socrates said yes to the hemlock she was an ordinary friend. That feelingof being stuck in paradise
Is This How I Wanted it to Go?
A forest away from the pulsationsof thinking. A forest still as raindrops falling off red pine needles.My ancestors. In this forest. I am not alive, in this forest.I know as a ghost knows, a lovely, fragile, shale hunger returning broken from my hands hung between the womb andwilderness, as it is born, a great disk-shapedsystem of gas, an accident of the […]
To Die Like Marat
The death of Marat wasbad, but at least he lookedgood. I don’t want to go out a slob,nothing against slobs. I want to die handsome, likeMarat, or at least the way Jacques-Louis David saw him with a letter in his hand and the sunlight casting a golden shadow on his shoulders, forehead, and left forearm.Stabbed […]
A Yellow Cardinal
Genetics could be the sole factor the same way roots of hemlocksthirst for affection like toddlers, some say it is an obscure type ofhermaphroditism, or some other theory perhaps the reason pumice smellsthe way it does, or the words surface to life from the lips of the newly awakened shining like a natural sermon, burning phosphorous and strikingthe earth, beneath the polar auroras yes, a yellow cardinal isno rarer […]