read Cribstone Bridge, Bailey Island Maine & Outskirts in Innisfree Poetry Journal
LISTENING TO JOHN COLTRANE WITH MY BABY DAUGHTER
To praise you is the desire of man—
Augustine again—and who am I to disagree
Holding my eight month old
At the embered end of a fussy winter afternoon
When she finally settles into my arms
As I sway her around the living room,
Surrendering myself to Trane’s testimony,
That eloquent exaltation (as the saint said,
What has anyone achieved in words
When he speaks about you?),
Her heart beating, her spontaneous breathing
Up against my own chest,
Her blue new eyes quietly open,
A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme.
-published in the Aurorean, 25th anniversary issue
TRAM
I waited on the outskirts
of nettles and diesel smoke,
stray billboards and bored pigeons,
unacknowledged, unacknowledging
my few fellows, each of us absorbed
in our solitary contemplations
as if only great concentration
(like that prescribed by
the anonymous author
in The Cloud of Unkowing)
could call forth the creaky, cranky tram
that would carry us,
heavy as it was, all the way
to the bustling heart of the Old Town,
obedient to an unseen power
it devoured greedily, scattering sparks
like generous crumbs, like words.
-published in Poetry East
MIDNIGHT IN THE E.R.
Doctors were plotting their
bold interventions
as if the look on my face
could be found in their manuals.
My lungs told them nothing,
blood refused to perform.
Drawn forth in fear and trembling—
hands clasped before me,
sweat crowning my brow—
the living water from my spine
was a pure revelation,
esoteric witness
to an undefiled source.
But the technicians of doom
weren’t concerned with such
holiness as they huddled
intoning my agnostic data.
I was lashed to a mast in a cyclone
machine, something charted
my brain my mind
left to its own
unscientific devices.
Mortality punched its clock
in the fluorescent netherworld.
The drunks and the homeless
disappeared before dawn.
At last a stranger came in:
there was no term for
my condition no reasons at all
they could name.
A carnal day was breaking.
I was free to go, free
to live or die.
-published in The Cafe Review