Tag Archives: spirituality
For now
Shy as beaked whales, my metacarpals surface from the swollen sea of my downstream hand, breaching a bruised ocean, a flood of healing. A mile away, ALS gathers the last of my friend, whose eyes no longer contain her. If dying were personal and malice medical, it would look like this: ruthless, relentless, clear and […]
Closed captioned
(pensive orchestration) I contemplate my life. (distant music; eerie, tentative) It is dark in here. What is this place? (music intensifies) I am born, wailing like I know what I’m in for. (Baby Elephant Walk) 10 pounds, 11 ounces. (baby crying) Colic for three months. (playful orchestration) I learn to talk, walk. Nothing goes really […]
The world’s most perfect couple
She lays herself out on the slow current, neck extended, orange paddles holding her steady as he circles, bobbing his shimmering head, then climbs aboard, mates, nibbles briefly her elegant nape, dismounts and circles once more, fast — an exhilaration, an exuberance — exhausting his fletched desire before settling beside her on the bank, resting […]
Witnessing your arrest
Wrists manacled outside a mediocre motel, you look like trouble, like habitual offense: arms sleeved in tattoos beneath a rumpled t-shirt, hair unkempt, jeans baggy around a leanness that says not enough, never enough; a face made for a mug shot. Yet your placid form, its complete acquiescence, and the courtesy in your voice, asking […]
Meteorology
I You and your hollow promises. Eager as a child on Christmas, I awaken early, craving the snow you forecast. Ninety percent chance, you said. Two to three inches. Liar. Decades of deceit; countless disappointments. Why do I still trust you? You’re no better than Lucy, promising that this time, this time, you will hold […]
Cabbage white in autumn
Today we induct into the Hall of Heroes a cabbage white, its wingspan little wider than a half-dollar, an artifact you may or may not remember: cool in the palm, serrated edges, the sharply embossed portrait of a young president whose life would likewise be truncated by the weather of the world. (On the coin, he still […]
For the bear who broke my fence
As you ready, you trouble our leavings: the forgotten feeder, the spilled seed. Your hunger accretes in the dark autumn air. Urgent. Insatiable. Hyperphagia, the scientists say. You say eat. You say drink. As you ready, you dream cubs from the world of spirit, from the world of ancestors. You dream their tiny bodies blind […]
Redaction
Your performance exhausted, you quit kindness. I quit the dating app, weary of auditions. Teetering on the brink of honesty, we stepped off. Briefly, you hated your mother. I admitted despair. For a time, nothing broke our fall. After we caught ourselves, we did not speak of it. Redacting the truth of gravity, we resumed […]
Later, you will be right
or earlier, error being a matter of premature or posthumous application of an answer to a question not now present, but also a matter of laziness, the query stated without the precision necessary to make the answer fit: hand in glove, key in lock. Your only chance is now. If it happens, you won’t know […]
Giles Corey recants
Such was the fever of the times that I spoke against my Martha, accused of witchcraft. My wife hath ben wont to sitt up after I went to bed, & I have perceived her to kneel down to the harth. as if she were at prayr, but heard nothing. Then I, too, was named. In […]
Meditatio Ephemera 