She wanted you to look at things: a pile-up of clouds,
Sunset transmutations, ribs of boat-like magnolia leaves,
Intricacies or simplicities of shells, almost weightless
Outgrown June-bug bodies. Nature, in short.
Anything outside ourselves.
The Power of a Smile The power of a gun can kill and the power of fire can burn the power of wind...
Read MoreUntil one day with work progressing
Soul does glisten near perfection
Not quite there the Blacksmith reckons
Put back in the fire again
Maybe there is a certain age at which a person’s chemistry changes, like a breaker switch being thrown, after which everything you thought you knew about yourself alters. This might explain the unnerving development I began to notice about fifteen years ago.
Read MoreAshoka told his story everywhere:
on rocks, pillars, iron columns,
and what he wrote startles even now.
Waging war, he admitted,
was a mistake.
The hummingbirds
arrived in our backyard
again this summer,
stopping to refuel
on their long flight south.
My father rages at time and fate,
wrestling with the angel of bandages,
burning the forge of his dying heart,
Tsu-jan Literally meaning self-ablaze, it is what I experienced standing in the riverbed of Cushman Brook that summer of drought those twenty-five years ago, my Labrador standing on the banks, curiously watching me, tilting her...
Read Moreweeps over the humid air at twilight,
a shallow creek meanders across town,
while small, white butterflies dissolve into
terminal nothingness—a cicada husk
I do know this: In the years that followed, I never again saw that little girl dance with the same abandonment as she did that Saturday morning in the aisle of the church bus which beetled its way north….
Read MoreAnd maybe letting go instead of holding on will be a harder process than you could ever imagine, harder than anything you have ever done before.
Read MoreTime awakens late—and slow.
Looks back—into a black hole.
