Hour of approach, hour of silence.The brother sets down his axe in the woods.The sister sets down her glasses on the tableand waits in the moment before prayerthat throbs from the tolling of the bell.Shadows swallow shadows in the frigid air.Hour of departure.Ledgers toted, windows shuttered.Late he

There is no poem like a gravestone,that tersely worded, lapidary tercet,the name, the numbers, and the R.I.P.that are the skeleton key to all biography.Some lie embedded, trapdoors in the grass,while others rear their monumentalcornices and angels, like cathedralswhere worms receive the body’s

A large cream colored mantiscaptured me todayby a wisp of my hairnear the nape of my neck. I flitted it like a leafthat fell from the aspen treebeneath which I read,not knowing the mystery that found me. Unfazedby my flitting, it regroupedto catch me againby the bridge of my glasses. 

Wood sways and mutters; palsied shutters bang.The call has come. Stripped of starlight, nightdwindles to gritty lavender and gray;mad jags of wind keep drowning out the surf.We dress, then slog through beach plums to the bay. Three days before, we calmed ten bottlenoses,then led an exodus into

Autumn is the time of yearwhen God’s invisible handpaints the leavesin broad strokesof color,then plucks them offone by one.

and all floating implementsstar studded saintsand gemstone dreamsmoon smoke      incensesquandered speechhearts that have wanderedstrangers squinting at the skythe cello notes risinglight escaping through a crack in the walldandelion fluff on a newborn’s headowl windthe old woma