Poetry

1. It was not the white fire across the pole nor trumpets above the desert, but a falling away— the vast dissolution. Like an ice flow, pieces broke off and flowed away and melted. Everyone knew the reasons and there were a thousand reasons each one reasonable until one day, it was we who broke...

Let death come to me in mid-stride, while I am occupied with other matters. Let my obituary be read and forgotten. Let my children tell their children about the grandfather they barely knew, spinning tales that make me wise and mysterious. Let my great-grandchildren at least hear my name. Then...

She is deafened by the sound of her own opinions. They echo and rattle between the walls. She rings them like cathedral bells; There she is in the back red-faced as a sacristan delirious among the bell ropes.

When I was twenty, ten years was half my whole life. When I was forty, they were just another phase. When I reached sixty, ten years drifted by like a sweet memory. Now at eighty, I misplace whole decades at a time and ten years pass swift as a child's summer.

In the slow stride of galaxies is heard the pulse of countless veins: our enormous our infintesimal wound about the finger and beneath the foot, you we ride and wear like diamonds like the tiara of a distant queen. All of evolution has led to this moment. Our epicycle without end is etched in...