Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
you’ve scraped me clean to the bottom
of the bowl, where the flint-
edge of spoon rasps against dented
metal, and lunar hollows give off
a cold and mineral light. From here,
the sky’s a bordered rim the eye
might skim, for the skin of passing clouds.
Now I’m anxious even for the sound of wind
or rain, the branches’ waking rattle,
downpour of warm remembered sun;
then by degrees the rising sap
like honey in the veins of trees.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
You’ve been here before, walked this path
under branches hung with brilliant rust
and yellow— all those moldering leaves
like torches lit for their glow, like lamps
whose wicks are dipped in tallow. For company,
only the nearby gurgle of a stream, the even
crunch of gravel. Solitude’s silver and blue
arrow streaks toward you, lodging like a piece
of ice under your skin. Fragments of salt
that lace the wind. Memory of others
come and gone, their spirits nudging you
toward wherever it is you need to be.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Are words more beautiful than things? In El
Greco’s painting of The Annunciation, the angel
in the gold-colored tunic is half-kneeling, half-
floating on a puff of cloud. The woman appears
to be in a scriptorium, though there is a marble
courtyard with a view of columns beyond, and a sky
chalked with white and blue. No oversized stars
reel yet in the dark, no hills ringed with the arms
of trees gilded with frost; no stumbling pilgrims
following the strange compulsion to search for
omens in the deepest part of the year. According to
tradition, he says to her: Be not afraid. Think about it:
how it is completely plausible she might have wanted
to bolt, run away to hide in the kitchen, in the fields
only stretching like eternity. But here is the moment,
clear and still: her hand pressed to her heart, thin
strip of crimson ribbon marking her place in the book.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Let’s fold and crease the paper, once here and once over. Remember cutting half the outline of a paper doll then watching a chain of them shake loose in the air? Identical in bobbed hair and pleated skirts, hand in hand in hand, soon nubile-breasted. On the edge of the lake, a dark-haired woman walks barefoot, skimming stones and feeding bread to the swan draped around her shoulders. Winged silhouettes are always harder to do, so this time let’s try sheets of ice shaved into snowflakes. Cut out the shapes of prisms through which the light can fan, clear and cold, feathered lace against the skeletal branches. Hold them up against window glass: such flimsy tokens that we offer at the turnstile, as we pass.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
This is the dark tip of the spindle creasing the clouds,
pulling the curtains down; this is the cue stick that flicks
the wobbly moon across a velvet-flocked table, hoping
yet to fill a pocket with casino silver. These are the few
remaining blades of scent from the last of summer’s
herb garden, where hair-thin slivers of frost have begun
to nest. Here are the low-creeping vines that argue in
their own impertinent flowering, for that green hope
which pushes between rocks and over graves. This
is the smolder of sticks, of touchwood and spunk
pushed into the grate as tinder; and this is
the resin that shades the veins copal or brittle
amber, amorphous soul I feed to the fire each day.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
All these years. How many years?
Ten? Eleven? That’s great. No,
I don’t have a portfolio. How great
that you could spend so much time
on vacation. White sands. I was there
just once: centuries ago. No, I’ve never
been to that Marina. I saw your pictures
in the infinity pool. That’s cool. It’s hard
to take time off; it catches up to you. I’ve
often wondered, why are all the people in
your photos, in restaurants all the time?
And everyone with a cell phone. The waiter
is a vegetable vendor? He’s putting himself
through school? I’m tempted to ask if he
will stock my mother’s pantry every Monday.
At her age, she prefers fruit and green
leafies. She texts me every few weeks
to say her cupboard’s getting bare: Send
money. Where’s that tree with bills
clipped to the leaves, which passersby
hardly notice? I’m gripped by spasms
that keep me from falling asleep at night.
And when I do, I dream of accountants
pursuing me with an abacus in each
hand. They’re dressed in grim or grey,
but the beads click like hungry teeth in day-
glo colors. You know I’ve never been good
at numbers. I used to know but have forgotten
how to reckon by them— something about ones,
tens, hundreds, thousands: expenditures
on one hand, omissions on the other.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
And in the driveway,
widening ripples
that form and overlap—
When it is time for me
to go, let me feel
at last the swell
of fullness I
might not have felt,
for all my striving:
for that moment let me be
the raindrop magnified
at the point of termination.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Risk is the fact that you have to go
not only farther, but deeper; or higher—
often only a tendril of scent to go on, or
whatever it was that woke you from sleep
so you could not return to its arms—
Impossible to do anything else but
discard old skins; to give yourself
to the flickering pulse in the lilac,
some dark eye in the leaves
that watches, and does not blink.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Start with something tiny, said the poet:
like a grain or a snowflake, and gather
around it the poem— in other words,
that process of improvisation you know
only too well: cobbling a cabinet from
castoff parts, landscape in the unlikely
viewfinder of a rusted keyhole. From
accident to accident, the map moves
for the most part toward clarity.
Walking in the wood, one day we come
upon a newborn fawn; and in the grass,
its mother licking the last traces of
the afterbirth. There’s always danger,
some current of the unknown that noses
us out, the smell of fear sharp like iron
in the gut. But nothing I’ve ever done
or faced unfixes that light moving through
the leaves, the animal’s instinct to save
itself from compromise. Pay attention,
she says. This is not only about you.
.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
an angel stands behind the entrance,
water in her cupped hands made of marble.
And in the nave, two by two, hour by hour,
nuns prostrate in prayer. Now they kneel,
though you are told that in the old days
they used to lie face-down on the stone
tiles, a strip of carpet beneath them.
Imagine the floor gradually warming
under their cheeks, the sides of their
foreheads. Hours pass. Shadows move
across the window. The only cloud in the sky
finds the sun, and still they don’t move.
In the atrium, the signs instruct: write
your petition on any of the strips of yellow
legal paper. Lay it on the plate. Drop
some coins and hear their muffled clink
in the collection box. Strike a match along
the iron votive holder. Hope that this isn’t all
improvisation, even as the choir begins a hymn.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.