Calling All Angels Leaves fall like secret prayers— calling all angels September’s having her best orgasm in a century. Everything lingers in climax, the character of the light, earthy fragrances, a whole heaving calendar week with an arched spine. Here’s how I know the world is ill and absurd: a dead fawn stares up from … Read more
Holy Hay I didn’t have a chance to show you the sainfoin I sowed back in May, remembering our holiday in Spain where we kept seeing it in bloom by the road and on waste ground, covering whole hillsides, great cerise stains of what we later learned was Holy Hay. Back here I bought some … Read more
THEY HAVE GAINED AN AUDIENCE with the divine. The plumbline is vertical as the resulting verse, so that neither agony nor ecstasy travel horizontally but curl and rise, sweet smoke from the swung thurible. Perhaps these are the only prophets left to us, still able to loop the loose thread of heaven through earth’s needle-eye, … Read more
THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR Lucky gull chicks on a city roof take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth; for them, life has begun as well as it could. The flightless chick who fell from its nest above and is abandoned by its parents on a hostile gull family’s roof is shut … Read more
The Vagabond J.M. Synge, 1871-1909 To comprehend, regard the brutal wilderness to hand. More than most, the burrow-broken vagabonds recall the living tune. In remoter reaches of the Wicklow hills, they live where a sodden soul could barely pass, and look out all the year on unimpeded barriers of heath. In every season, heavy sleets … Read more
And Not Your Garments Lord, Lord this my heart full of secrets, seeds I know you did not send—Lord, I cannot rend. If I am choked, therefore, by weeds, I will not ask for a mended garden, I won’t beg your holy pardon at scythe’s end. These were difficult to bury, so little loam left … Read more
All is Number If the late afternoon light is beautiful but God’s not behind it then my mind is just classifying; if the late afternoon light is beautiful and God designed it, it’s a blessing and a deep unknowable well: light seems a word beyond metaphor — a wave and a particle neither wave nor … Read more
Faerie Fire From forests, fields and fens, fair folk are found, where witchery winds with the wailing wind, dug deep down dreams drooled by departed drowned, as painfully professed by powers pinned. In iron, imps immersed incur ill eye, manacled to mortal machinations, while led by living lights, our lost lives lie sunk ‘neath stars … Read more
St. Patrick’s Day 2024 My dream takes me to the White House where Kelly green fountain streams spit red globules, ricochet on the pristine lawns. Dirty skies sit low, a brazen breeze propels smell of sizzling flesh to the oval office stage where emerald men show cause bear not the crystal bowl of shamrock, Mr … Read more
Year of The Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord twenty twenty-four, year my words marched backward into my mouth and forward only when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler, year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of our lady of fuck around … Read more