In response to a student who told me he just “skims” the poetry right before classThe barn was in the Netherlands ( Read more... )

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover ( Read more... )

Walking in the warmest afternoon ( Read more... )

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through ( Read more... )

In a world where all the heroes ( Read more... )

Last night you called me out to the December dark ( Read more... )

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over ( Read more... )

The singer of owls wandered off into the darkness ( Read more... )

Of the genesis of birds we know nothing,
save the legend they are descended
from reptiles: flying, snap-jawed lizards
that have somehow taken to air. Better the story
that they were crab-apple blossoms
or such, blown along by the wind; time after time
finding themselves tossed from perhaps a seaside tree,
floated or lifted over the thin blue ( Read more... )

Milling inside on the lookout windows hundreds of moths
blot the cobalt beauty of heaven. A mass that neither finds itself

nor flies apart. Like buttercups floating in profusion from under a bridge,
their appearance equally strange. All is from God, all are fragments

torn from God: that is how Plato saw it. The moths
jerk about, pricked to the heart by ( Read more... )