When the older brother lifts his little brother up
So high in the air
above the dock, out into the deep river
Light scatters everywhere
And I think
You are my magical and amazing Older brother
Giving me, your little sister,
Flight
Heroic
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Category Archives: Poetry
Atheist Analogies
Like never reading the love letters I wrote you
Words scattered all around
Like never seeing how
I let the blazing suns of a thousand remote
Solar systems blink your name
Like ignoring the food on your plate
The clothes neatly folded and pressed
The hands that kept you there
Breathing in, breathing out, wanton flowers
The messages painted on the billboard of the world
Child come home,
Rain come down
I’ll never stop looking
Across this field for you
“Brace yourself like a man”
Job 38:1-7 KJV
[1] Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, [2] Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? [3] Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. [4] Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. [5] Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? [6] Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; [7] When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Stray showers
At first I cajole them, tell them their wisps stretch out like the spines and wings of angels and dragons, I compare them one to another–formidable strangers towering in sun-soaked splendor,
But when they keep back the rain, it is I who begins to storm, arms stretched and gesticulating wildly
Speak! I say
Rain! I say
Like the petulant child I am
Stomping my feet in anger,
As though that could work
As though it might just
Bring more than stray showers
The Imaginary Conversation
He is gone now
Gone to me, anyway
But I think of the things I would ask him if he were still here–
Would persistent nausea be enough? Or swarms of stinging insects? How about dead bodies? Or all the stubbed toes and fingers gone unmended
What if this post-modernist hell of your own invention were not unbearable heat, agony and utter despair
Forever/
Just
… an airless room, waiting for a love which never comes
All your regrets all your missed chances
To cry like a baby
Wail for a Savior
Weep at his feet, hair in hand, perfume spent
Shaken finally by what you
Would have been without Him
You say the sweetest things
You say the sweetest things
A soft answer turns away wrath
Love is always patient
What if you took the terrible letters of a curse of sorts
One you never willed and controlled and made it into an acrostic or a cypher-
The letters are a-b-I-r-r-t-u-w
What if that were a word by itself
And you-like the fairy godmother you resemble in rounded form only
No power only soft and aging
No longer the princess or the sleeper or the magic one
Just this one last spell-
Let the word when spoken
Set us free from past and illusion
Let it be the strange, scary truth of the thing-
Oh fragile love-
You say the sweetest things
Pebble Parable
It was a simple thing
The man reached in and snapped off the treadmill
Came in very close to the boy’s face
Told him “the rules”
Only it turned out “the man” didn’t know the rules as well as he thought he did
Rules like the way a single pebble can make a concentric circle across the whole chest of a river
Or the way the question about what you would do with a time machine
Might just define a person
Forever, forever is how wide and how deep and how long I will
Love you like a pebble
Thrown right at the heart
Of moving water.
Like a time traveler
Like a time traveler, Lazarus returns, sits with me on the steps of the old San Antonio house
We hug our knees together, the way children do
I tell him my losses
And he tells me his founds
–you never forget the way
Dim shadows turn to light.
Herbie Robinson
You name it
The thing you will lose
Have lost
Are losing
Give it a fictional name
Tell Quint not to wait for you
Because this grief
Is just killing time
The Graffiti Artist
I can’t stop thinking about how he lets us
Draw pictures in the wet cement
Our little hands, our squiggly messages
No one would call this art
But they might call it
Mine, fierce love
Carrying Light 