I will send you a million, million
Little lanterns
Rising points of light
from the same lit flame
Each inscribed with the story of how I lost you
How could I have lost you
When the greatest of these is love,
Little Lantern?
Little Lanterns
1
Category Archives: Poetry
Pearl
Once upon a time the Treasure of the world entire told a story about treasure in a field, treasure within treasure, a kingdom in a kingdom in a seemingly arbitrary object, a field of the whole world
I remember when these angry men were children, lovable children, and now they behave as though they still don’t know
You are the treasure
The King and his Kingdom is the treasure.
And if that were not enough, what will a man do if he (gains the whole world)
And loses his own soul?
Levitas
The children hover above
The greenest grass
Their small, bare feet
flip back and forth rhythmically keeping them
Aloft, airborne hummingbirds
Their father questions this decision
This ordinary use of levitation which can only be
Accomplished by the very young
But I insist I remember once being just such an unfettered soul
Defined by light
Dearest Girl,
Pfft. I started to write a short story about you and your fairy godmother. She is a larger-than-life-take-no-guff fictional lady who lives in a real house in a real town where we both had our hearts broken.
She had a red-brick house with an actual turret in the middle of the cozy little town Kipling called Muskrat–Kipling, who might have advised handing you over to Baloo or Bagheera had you and I met up with him in our peripatetic trips about town.
I would let you run (fast as you can) to each stop sign (but wait for me there), most alarming for the people in their cars, always concerned you would just keep running.
I realized I could not finish the story. You can’t know a fairy godmother is trustworthy on the first or the second or the 500th day. You can’t know until
You figure out for yourself why and how she stares down all comers
As the most beautiful music
Spills out over the lawn, into the dark, dark night.
We live in other rooms
The sun inhales deep, swims down, down to us through a drowned world of trees, still our guardian angels, bright fish dart among them, impersonating song birds, the children are not safe here anymore
As ordinary men huddle and cast lots
for the seamless robe of
God
The Harrowing of Hell
We ask liturgical questions, why must the dead pretend they are anything else, here in the depths of the world where we have waited so long? We resemble our former selves, only shadows now, constructing chalk outlines of the world which has gone on without us
When he breaks through we watch in awe, chalk outlined arms raised, like children who must be helped into
The clothing of this beautiful
Hereafter
Lazarus/Dives
Mangling the vulgate so close to the end of our story, dive, I tell him. Dive into the deep
Blue water, temporary darkness
The way a man may rise
From his own grave, from his shroud
If the voice of the Divine
Calls him back
Was it a crime?
Was it a crime for the man in the silver truck to exit his vehicle to drag the wounded doe to the median?
Then leave her there.
Was it a crime to drive past her
her immobility
As she lifted her head
in pain and wonder
At all of us, terrible Samaritans
Leaving her to die alone.
The Occasional Simile
Your love
is like
the mints I fish from the bottom of
my purse
Eulogizing Joe
Methuselah lived 969 years, which means that at just over 100, my grandfather was a spring chicken, as lifespans go. That notwithstanding he got a lot done. Married, participated in at least three wars, fathered children, buried some. Lost a wife, found another, called me his oldest unmarried granddaughter for as long as it applied.
I loved him in all his iterations, in all his familiar imperfections, but I know Someone who loves him more.
The One who is the Road
The All and Only
Road Home.
Psalm 116
Carrying Light 