Explore Poems: Faith & Doubt

          Can I still call you
                    Emily? Not long after
we last saw each other, I too changed

          my name. Dropped …

Within this simple chapel, located near the navel
of the little clinic, the walls are all the white
of…

You’re fifteen and nowhere in a town on the edge of pitiful lands stripped of fruit. The burger van’…

I walk down a dim hall, and appreciate the coruscating layer of wax on the floor(how I could sleep there…

I loved a preacher’s son.

Hide and seek
in labyrinthine basements
red roses and kissing.

A deep wooden…

This morning the wolf did not want to get out of bed.

The moon ate the sun yesterday and we are all…

mi ’buelita Socorro
woulda loved this

basilica, un homenaje
for la Virgencita, the story

of her life, her…

in your kiss or fingertips,
or how you liked to say goodbye,
arms squeezing through my middle
to lift…

I used to pray to a man-faced god.
Kept his whip beneath my bed.

Set alarms for daybreak lashings.
Pressed white cotton to the flay.

Made flags of the bloodsoak.
Raised them from my window.

Called this worship.
Dreamt heaven a jury small as a county

where nobody...

Between us, there are one hundred one
umber haints in our home.

In bed, we discuss
our future, our children…

I used to think
there was only one of  You
before the miscarriage.
Now, I am not so sure.
Maybe there are…

Ultimately everything
          Becomes boring.
Even great miracles
          Become boring.
Even the tremendous powers of…

How horrible it is, how horrible
that Cronenberg film where Goldblum’s trapped

with a fly inside his Material
Transformer: bits of the man emerging

gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
worrying that his agent’s screwed him—

I almost flinch to see the body later
that’s left its...

Rotor wash, or the downward-flowing
Air by which our helicopters formed
Imprints in the jungle grass beneath
Now stands effectively for Vietnam
Because our understanding of that war
Omitted many things but not the wind
We bowed our heads and fled. In this case we

Refers effectively...

In the hiding
hour of autophagy
ghosts hang out all day and talk to us.
An archival haunting demanding tribute:
     half a lime for breakfast every day.
بشرٌ يئنّونَ من الألمِ
human voices keening in pain
تُشعلُ أجسادَهُمَ النارُ
their bodies, consumed by fire
light up the...

The wish to climb a ladder to the loft
Of God dies hard in us. The angels Jacob saw

Were not himself. Bramble is what grows best
Out of this man-scarred earth, and I don’t chop it back

Till the fruit have ripened. Yesterday I...

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes...

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the...

Ah blessed absence of God,
How lovingly I am bound to you!
You strengthen my will in its pain
And make dear to me
The long hard wait in my poor body.
The nearer I come to you,
The more wonderfully and abundantly
God comes upon me,
In...