When grief unseats my soul within the world, adrift and shining, searching for a home, I lift my face to night’s sky of star-pearled signs, crying out I am never alone. Love’s bond is the bridge to the other side. It always finds me in my time of need. And holds my heart, arriving like…
Do not be afraid. It’s just God, fanning the dark train of his blue gown over the forest floor, taking his seat, sifting for his mark in that secret book on his lap, from where he’ll read to us, and to the animals that stayed behind, blinking inside tree hollows, or yielding their bodies under…
Our love has made eternity and in it we will spend, long-armed days that stretch o’er sea swells, whose rolling never ends. I come to you like a sunrise, you hold me like the moon. One heart imbued with forever, One soul to light the fuse. What wealth abides as we stay here, What wealth…
She spent years underwater, feeling God prepare her body below the sensible bulrushes, below the savage certainty of need. She made a home there inside that holy hunger, her terrible jaw a bloody cup filling over and over again. One day it would all make sense. One day— just before dawn, on a reed, she…
I kneel over the Walden Pond in me, a deep green Earth’s eye into which I see the secret of the poet’s sacred art of striking at the stone to find the heart. With pen and pad I rise to walk the land, whose pleas roll through my soul and out my hand. I’ll speak…
I don’t do this enough. Journal about one of the 960 days that comprise my sobriety tonight. I have many journals of day ones and day 30s and they still mean everything to me and are very much a part of the 960 today. All of those broken pieces have been repurposed to form the…
I open my kitchen blinds and gape at the hawk, perched on the garden lamp at the edge of my lawn. She notices everything with those prehistoric, ravening eyes, like two old stars, charged with origin stories far more savage than mine. She isn’t here to sing— She’s here to scream— To tear meat from…
Winter drops the late afternoon sun into my bedroom window just after three o’clock. He hovers there— burning the edges of my closed curtains like an eclipse I can touch. He says, you have to invite me in, which I find charming. My palms hover over the fabric, pin-holed from cats, reminding me of that…
Your sleek, black body pressed on the stucco wall in my backyard should have frightened me, Latrodectus— But instead I felt like I did as a child, crunching through the woods, achingly aware of things greater than myself. I made your acquaintance then, discovering that you go days without breathing, you bond to vertical surfaces,…
If I accomplished nothing else today, I planted Nepeta cataria inside the broad mouth of a flowerpot leftover from my grandfather’s passing. I held a ponytail of her sticky locks and considered long the origin of her species, the ancient quality of dirt unearthed with five extra heaves of the shovel, and of Annie Dillard…
Sobriety Poet 