Search parties
Yes
Desires
The wooden torso of Christ
Search parties
If you believe my story
that a lost city in Arabia was found
by satellite, white camel
trails bisecting the old
merchants’ dream, when nothing
in sand drifts ever surrendered
to search parties below;
and if you tell me fire rings abandoned
in winter grounds of tribes
of arrowheads against the cavalry
will poke up like spring
shoots from an aerial view,
though unsuspecting surveyors
trip against the artful stones;
yes, and if you consider
that before it felt too fragile,
English schoolchildren
could picnic in the eye
of the Uffington Horse,
chalked against a mountain before
History was ever a subject of discussion;
then believe this. What I see
from this hovering distance
is you, complete as art, fragile
as forgiveness, alive,
though everyone thought
you were stone-sand,
and holy.
Yes
A flying squirrel only falls slowly….
The sun is a star, but not all stars are suns.
Waves move in light. Grass grows down.
All those names of things we had been given
were not true, not true, but somehow yes.
We don't know what, but maybe
there is a name somewhere.
Desires
All I ever wanted,
small as a hand’s hollow,
was a pretty barn swallow
sitting on a low wire,
cobalt with a chest of fire.
If you called I would nest
there on your shoulder —
Here bird. Here bird.
I would go in and out,
trailing grasses and down.
Here the seaward window splinters —
a grief of gulls, white
as a luffing sail, scrapes
the air and I
sit waiting on this wire.
The wooden torso of
Christ
The Cloisters, New York
So agonized, his head and limbs tore off.
His trunk is carved
like a beach log in Alaska.
His loincloth weeps red,
rough and Byzantine. Reconcile
me, Lord, reconcile. Instead
of thieves on either side, the women hang
about, groaning for a thousand years.
If I could touch his skin
I would be healed.