All posts tagged: Poetry

The Four Directions of Light

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Poetry

The limited predictive intelligence of nuance can sometimes permit the obfuscation of the glaringly obvious. Said another way: forecasts predicated on the data typically accrued during the life span of a single human being are known to be astoundingly flawed. This may explain why Hafiz and Rumi stare at me like a pair of dispassionate fieldstones on the verge of sprouting horns when I wax extemporaneously about the day’s events— as if my mouth is moving, […]

Out in the Open

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Christ / Poetry

This writing has undone me, peeled away my knowing and my nonsense, and led me way out way out from the edge to where there are no shadows, to where the clear light is visible in every direction, to where the wind is always scented by the horizon– in hues of timber and sunlight, in copal, cedar, and jasmine. Some days flowers fall from the sky, but no matter. What would it matter? I remember […]

Freshly Cut Light

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Poetry

I was a diamond on the ride in today, a precisely cut sentience whisking across the frozen tar, a conscious particle accepting every direction, every possibility, into its center. Breathing. Zooming. Flooding the radio silence with unformed memories. Remembering forty years from now. Embracing the horizon’s glow. Letting that fire reflect inside of me from every angle before being released. Calling every misgiving home from the wild. Setting out food. Becoming the rookery while it’s […]

Any Way They Can

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Poetry

I can’t work like this, I muttered. (I get emotional sometimes around beings of the most radiant candor– the ones who tell you like it is without even moving their lips, who shatter whole lifetimes of log-jammed feelings with a kind of glimmering eye thing and an emanating peace that sneaks up on you like a heated seat, a peace that feels as though it’s backstopped by a battalion of compassionate mountain lions who keep […]

Clouds, Shaken

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Poetry

The distance, receding. The sky so full of feathers, it’s obvious the gods tore open the clouds, shook them out over the land, and tossed their empty skins in a pile by the river. We’re back in the Dreamtime. The cold has come alive, the sky become an arctic fire, her sparks fluttering in a swirling dizzy of ballerina embers, and the hawk’s vision is still again, flooding my skull, impaling my every thought, studying my […]

When I Say Jesus…

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Christ / Poetry

When I say Jesus in these poems, I hope you don’t think that I think that I know with any real precision what I’m talking about. When a stone says yes to one day returning to the shimmering heart of a star, and the star says yes to beaming that stone’s endless heart through all of space and time, and the gravity inside of every pebble, rock, and speck of sand becomes a continuum of Meaning, […]

An Incurable Obstinance

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Christ / Poetry

When Jesus was young they thought he had a learning disability. At the very least, they reconciled themselves to the fact that the boy possessed an incurable obstinance. At the dinner table, for instance, despite the most pressing tutelage, he refused to concede that an apple and a pear were innately different, choosing instead to refer to them both giddily as flowers. His mother and his father were also not permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of […]

Falling Snow (New Life)

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Poetry

Snow is carefully disguised propaganda dropped by spring a few moons in advance of Her campaign, a dusting of crystalline apples and bergamots, acorns and pomegranates, perfect white kernels of new life. Snow is a fresh coat of time-delayed beauty sprinkled onto the land that muffles every footstep and rounds off every corner, dissolving every edge into a pure continuum, while augmenting the whack whack whack of unimpressed woodpeckers. Pay attention they say. whack whack whack […]

A Few Prognostications

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Poetry

I’m not really prophet material, but how do you know if you don’t try…? Right…? (Lots of forced, intensely preparatory meditative breaths.) (Some swearing in confused frustration.) (And then…!) A few early warning signs Heaven on Earth is about to pull into the driveway: The number of trumpet players per capita starts feeling like a metric that can no longer be ignored. It starts to make intuitive sense why everything is so beautiful. Professional sports teams […]

Double or Nothing

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Poetry

I don’t know who or what God is anymore. Each time I say this, my Loving doubles. Once I stepped into a room with block walls and old, worn carpets to sit in the circle with a prayer in my heart while the man who travels through worlds was bound at the center. Light was extinguished, and darkness soared. Singers joined us from the air itself. The drummers poked holes in our boundaries. Lightning tickled the […]