Journal Award)
Relief: “One A.M., Mid-January,” “Compost,” “Step away from the closing door”
Ruminate: “Self Portrait w/ Icon,” “The Yoke”
St. Katherine Review: “January,” “Fr. Nicholas” (section 3)
Spiritus: “Vocation”
Suss: “From Here I Cannot Say What Kind It Is”
Tar River Poetry: “Instant Karma”
Wind: “Time. Coffee. Rain”
Windhover: “Mary”
The following poems appeared in the chapbook, Self Portrait w/ Disposable Camera (Finishing Line, 2012: finalist for Black River and White Eagle Coffee Store Press chapbook contests): “On Little Boys & their Guns,” “Cecil McBee’s Right Ear,” “Instant Karma,” “Simple Enough,” “Washing Dishes After the Feast,” “In Your Absence,” “On the Way to Putnam,” “Love Song,” “The Exhibit,” “Stepping through mercury,” “Step away from the closing door,” “So It Goes,” “Time. Coffee. Rain,” “What I Answered,” and “Self Portrait.”
1
The Exhibit
Over on Lexington, in the glassy foyer
of Saint Peter’s Lutheran, four
Fujimura paintings, the largest
a two-panel sea of blues and greens
with—faintly—a fruited quince emerging
or disappearing, like the entire New York skyline
in the holiday blizzard we stepped back into
early that afternoon, threading our way home
around abandoned taxis. Pushing through the best
of the storm’s windblown drifts, down each
unplowed block of the graying city,
no more than ten souls in sight—all boots
and mittens, scarves and hats—and finally,
above the intersection we call ours, maybe thirty pigeons
playing mid-air, like children or bundled tongues of flame
not quite ready to complete their ecstatic descent.
If I could, I’d paint it—the appearance
of the likeness of the glory of the Lord—after
late Turner. No borders, no date, no discernible time
of day. Only the relative coordinates:
West 51st Street at 9th Avenue.
Though really it could be almost anywhere.
Time. Coffee. Rain
for JGD
We’ve not seen such rain for months. And maybe
because of the storm, or what fell from the cheek
of a young girl asleep in Malaysia, Charlie Hunter’s
jazzy cover of Marley’s Natty Dread just leapt
onto the cafe’s new stereo. Here on the fat edge
of this window counter, as I relish having scored
a parking space within steps of my weekly coffee stop,
I elect to consider a notion I’ve heard for decades,
that it’s better to enter heaven minus sinful parts
than be thrown undivided into hell. I get a picture
I don’t like of me standing at that threshold, various
limbs, organs, glands tagged, “Property of Hell,”
and suddenly I’m aware that neither the prospect
of gaining heaven whole nor the anticipation of shame
at having given hell even the slightest satisfaction
has proved sufficient to effect the good result.
Sure, I’d like to be pure in heart; I’d like to see God,
but these days I’m trying to be kinder to my body.
Besides, tonight after his lesson at Longy, my son and I
are on to hang around the square and, after burritos,
settle ourselves at a front table in a hotel jazz club
to witness firsthand Charlie Hunter’s eight-string magic.
I’m holding two tickets for the ten o’clock show,
and if the radio weather man’s on target, by the time we
hit the road home this rain should be well out to sea.
Still Working It Out
for Robin Needham, killed in the 2004 Christmas tsunami
Something
shuddered in the un-
fathomable dark, and a wave
shouldered forth
like an eighteen wheeler
skidding sideways
into oncoming traffic—a wave
inhering by the power
of a word lovely
as snow on a navy sleeve,
the same word
that shuddered in each
dark cell of the dead
Christ, a wave shouldering forth
like a new heaven, new
earth, clearing away
the old, the impossible—a wave,
a word, terrible as it is
great, great as it is holy
and terrible.
