THE OTHER SIDE OF LISTENING

What will

it take

to open

the door

of belief?

Asking

the right

questions?

Or something

more basic?

A new kind

of listening,

perhaps?—

that, though

beyond you,

you inhabit

like the voice

of an ancestor.

CARRERA

Don’t writhe and strain

against the weight

that is all around you.

Move through it like water.

Dance to the music

of mallet and chisel

‘til you find your contraposto pose.

Explode from the block, the rock.

Emerge into life, your life,

as sculptor from slave,

with all excess chipped away—

and your hands now free

to embrace what you’ve rescued,

what you’ve cut from Carrera.

THE HINGE

Between

This and that

There is

An edge

A fringe

Where 
Because

Of proximity

Two things

Each unlike the other

Meet and mingle

Through extremities

Touch

And become

A third thing:

Resemblance.

And everything

In that place

And in that

Moment

Hangs

In the balance

Like a hinge.

THE FENESTRATOR

When you least expect it,

God, the great fenestrator—

if you believe

in that sort of thing—

will install and open

a window.

All at once

you are a dwelling

the season

and bird song

enter

carrying the taste

of early morning

rain.

THE JESTER

It takes a village

to make a village.

It takes many

to make a circle–

the Lover alone

can’t do the job,

nor can the Wise Man.

Invite Coyote in

and you’re half-way there,

half-way ‘round the mulberry bush,

well on your way to popping

the proverbial weasel.

A kingdom is nothing

without the mockery

and impunity of its Jester.

Just ask the Immortal Bard,

he’ll tell you:

that, measure for measure,

love’s labor’s not lost

as long as you look 

to the comedy of errors 

for your answers.

THE SITTER*

Beauty…

It touches so deeply

it causes us to know something

about ourselves

we did not already know.

Beauty is a mirror held up before us.

We can see ourselves as sitters in it 

and the world as our painter.

Our lives are its pigment, 
pastose strokes, and canvased dance.

We are its portrait.

And, where Sargent might have seen

the animal in his Madame X,

what the world shows us,

if we are willing to see it,

is the human in the animal,

the man inside the finch, let’s say,

the tiny heartbeat behind

the fine feather and brittle bone of love.

*Inspired by Donna Tartt's 

Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Goldfinch

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION AT THE CORNER LAUDROMAT

an ancient

head to toe

in white

had she not

been overwhelmed

by her work

—a mountain

of sheets she was

feverishly folding—

I would have sworn

she was the color

white incarnate

busy

conceiving itself

through creases