The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’
"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."
The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride
“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”
“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”
“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”
“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”
“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”
“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”
“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”
“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god”
“This insufficient code of the soil—/aphasia’s shorthand where/language lathers in mud, masquerades its atoms”
“The tower tall strikes bells. The day slinks out/Leaving behind skies watercolor clear/And gives the evening air the taste of song”
“the idiosyncrasies, stamps of my proprietorship”
“we struck/each other so often, too often,/like astronauts/scraping for the last flight/back to earth”
“waxen winter plants, an oil portrait of a stillborn son,/sensory deprivation tank”
“For this, we built a star-searcher/and launched it/into the galaxies:/Mirror upon giant mirror/sifting through time”
“Someone recently fell/into an industrial mixer at the latter’s factory./The company sent bread/from the same facility to her funeral.”
“What kind of light flames on them? What’s on fire—/A church? A shop? But also inward: desire”
“I envisioned myself old on a mountain hike/a soft breeze lifting my long white hair/I thought I’d live ‘til ninety-five”
“Sinister pinwheel/stuck to a breezeless sentence/as sly ornament—”
“I swore I heard willows cry/through the zig zagged fields,/traveling through my universe/as quickly as the moon touches our light”
“The city never sleeps: the isle of faces illuminated by cell phones/is proof its waking isn’t rising, only beeping, only static,/only the cashier in the convenience store, only flickering.”
the gilded tree that glitters in dusklight/like an upside-down chandelier
“We thought there couldn’t be anything more./But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods./Beautiful and horrific are the moment’s songs.”
“Bruises bloom roses; the blind bird has fled./Ocean quiet bedroom night light turned dim,/the sting of his fist purple on her skin.”
“the specific iteration of woodpecker pecking at yet/another juicy place, but I forgot to pack the guidebook”
“The news we got at first was dire,/the damage bad though not entire”
“Seek mercy for eggs we scrambled in a youth/spent banging pots and pans together./For the telling of clumsy lies, our voices/cracking like pecans together.”
“How/it both is, and is not/a type of existence.”
“And then a tide of blood fell back in me/after that I walked with open ears/I found that the trees had voices, and/they sang like forgotten, sunless seas.”
“Night flower,/short-lived lover/of darkness,/offspring of cactus,/desert jewel/lulled awake/by moonbeams”
“Doom is there staring, everywhere/I go, like a brazen coyote/dead center of the road/half-starved so it doesn’t care anymore.”
“The hand drops a fresh globe/into the scoured skull, secures breath upon/the hemispheric nostrils and stands back,/appraising…”
“Among a murder of mannequins/the guilty can’t be picked out of a lineup.”
“The woods sigh. And then, a thousand miles away,/I’m in your arms again. Your breathing is an ocean./I’m drifting away. You whisper.”
“There is a fervor that I do not surge with,/A saintliness with which I do not sing.”
“Having just emerged from her tv and ac,/she was too sun-shocked and asphyxiating/to hear ‘it’s a lovely shoot’/as my spade severed the root.”
“I scatter the sandpipers who/run from me/but not/the tides.”
“her body, between the buildings/behind her and the parked cars/in front, throwing a coal-black shadow/on the ground the color/of tarnished silver…”
“You had time to contemplate its masonry/and recall that other jail, the temple/of muscle and flesh built by your trade/of bricklayer, now turning wan and idle.”
“The far shore wore a gauzy veil of rain./Dark thunderheads rose over Evian/and shook the silver surface of the lake,/ruffling like shot silk.”
“Cicadas, dirty oil, dogs, Venus, gloves/clouds, manholes, fled storms, black notes, harmonies/float indiscriminate as my head throbs/then disappear on the next wisp of breeze”
“While others cycled to dusty fields,/sported bats and mitts, shouted to claim/their favorite positions, I was alone,/my red Schwinn and me—no/deception of ritual, no useless chatter,/no bad calls, no vicarious parents.”
A poem by Nancy Byrne Ianucci.
“After supper,/God burps through his heartburn, eyes Gabriel/and—as expected—punishes: Two thousand years/hard labor for your antics, errand boy.”
“and I send her sunflowers on a sunny day./and I think of her children./and I sing with the Wailers.”
“The Sistine Chapel hived billions/of microbes, moss piglets/throbbing on God’s finger, frescoes flooded/with bacteria, angels fruiting cocci.”
Beyond a life of seeing, saying, being, by sparest nudge or shimmer, I shall cease. I ask what for, the dying, what the living. I start recording. I collect and keep.
“Coughing, ululating, barking, whooping./Can he cough out the memory of a lonely/girl waiting, wanting, watching, waiting?”
“Wife of himself/she taught him how to be in this world/as all women teach. The woman in you/will teach you, man king,/how to be.”
“Ever human-centric/We self-aggrandized/Anthropomorphized/And now agonize.”
“The old man had paid dearly/he could still get lost in dreams”
“The bright green of summer wheat/with the brown of the ducks that stalk the fair/dykes where the raft spiders search for things to eat.”
“He feels himself watched/as he counts accents./He knows the painter’s/watching for the precise moment/when his blue ink freezes.”
“In oncoming lights, my veins are dirty strings.”
“Every night/A lover be”
“In yellow night, the day refuses to give ground/and I prepare to wait out its siege. Soon you’ll/arrive, and together we’ll chant the Midnight/Sutra”
“Held in palm,/a bloom of peony to/inspect.”
“A metaphysical compass, a refrain, an unyielding ethos in which to believe,/no longer reserved for near misses with the vehicular minions of the MTA,/I have come to regard existence as nothing more/than this pull between hesitation and action”
“to my dog/Nate/as he is finishing/a seizure/i repeat/i am with you”
“Wire/protects the beech/from bladed lovers/initial-besotted for years,/each letter a small death.”
“Soon first responders make a grim/assessment of the odd catastrophe.”
“Then you arrived like fresh tulips in winter,/the shape of my heart, the color of gold;/you turned the weeds in my garden into roses,/every rock on my farm was a bar of chocolate/waiting to feed our future generations…”
“I scan rooms with a happiness detector,/which is like a broken Geiger counter/that stays silent while the bombs go off.”
“Age isn’t just a number, as we’d heard/it’s how we get here. I’m twice my daughter’s age/and neither thought we’d haul ourselves this far.”
“I have/a secret pigeon in my heart./I keep it in a cage composed of object lessons and feed it/moral law.”
“Lost in the Woods is a symptom/of heart’s sudden loss/of direction registered in small/persistent cramps and little gasps.”
“Night’s ink congeals on rice, coating peas/like black sea pebbles glistening in the harrowed/moonlight staring through the shattered kitchen window.”
“In shallow ripples bathing together in pairs, as may be seen by the deep, clear waters of Xiangjiang.”
“Nonetheless, a worm/had eaten its way through any number/of Gabriel’s lines, some of his best./He had to reconstruct them from memory,/or compose them anew.”
“On its dead claws and back, mottled and plain,/from a long beach whose gulls roost on an edge,/Inscrutable.”
“Why does she ask forgiveness?/For what and from whom?/Why does she call herself/a mountain tiger?”
“Examining for mixed motives the flaws/That turned their city-cousins ash-/Grey. She labels one Snow-in-Ghana,/As though she doesn’t trust her own desire.”
“I am alive and you’re alive, and hope exists,/but I have to bid farewell to these words of mine,/which I will never shout, because I’m but a man. “
“And working together, what might we become?/citizens of a single kingdom./you could find it all in the palm of your hand/alongside Indian, yellow and black.”
“I sometimes think I don’t belong here/in this wood–that the tree’s knots/are frowns grown for me, or the leaf crunch/is a worm cracking a crass joke at my expense.”
“Here on a narrow one-lane/overgrown with cattails and ivy/the circle of turkey buzzards draws closer.”
“In the actual, from which another life/Is straining to burst, to set out in navigation,/Or be swallowed by demons in the leaves.”
“So many stars and mountains, crests and sky,/Are we not fools to think that we can know/What underlies such intricate designs?”
“My mad uncle had the Burma jungle/In his head—burnt-out tracts of history/He’d stalk in ambush of his sanity”
“Doubt/Never stunned the marrow in their bones/Who rose above the merely physical,/And if they faltered, it was only once—”
“Insects fall silent amid the sedge and cranes grow restive in the treetops,/Sensing this busy world no longer cares for the sentiments of old.”
“You returned to Rome Augustus triumphant./King of defeated nation I trailed behind./To this day the senators can’t tell/which of the two wore the wreath.”
“Every object, rests on its certain devaluation/In the implacable fact of an ending—decay,/Dissolution, death—from which another/New thing and its solicitation emerges.”
“‘Sometimes all a man needs is a horizon/in which to vanish,’ I thought.”
“Or was it the Living God/Who did do this,/And not Hosea?”
“What magnificent coordination. A ballet/on wheels. Impossible, but there it was/day after rainy day, not one collision.”
“We must take the language/by surprise;/seal its every utterance/with a kiss or tear…”
“Sometimes—in the middle of fair night—/when disobedient moon turns vandal/and violently rips off the bolts/of my window-shutters, my eyelids…”
“No thought, as that of mine, to complete the bare/Purpose of their being, which is to feed and breed,/Become another edible, leave another seed.”
“And because you are beautiful do not think/The Nereids will hear you, or Neptune wake/And the sea calm, and you will not sink”
“And where, but in constant circularity/Is all this moving headed?/The answer Cannot be death…”
“‘Where now security, what to trust?’/The cycle of an invisible moon has/Our harbor in its force, another period/Has begun: the existing limits to be tested.”
“Yet there is no one thing, no attribute/Of yours that I can fix on, nothing/I can abstract, describe, isolate…”
“‘What have you got there?’ ‘It’s snapper.’/“Did you catch it?’ ‘No, my dad caught it—/He says to watch out for any tiny bones.’”
“Anyone who keeps/A compost heap knows the whole of life”
“And that we might as well stop killing one another,/because everyone who lived during the French Revolution is dead anyways.”
“In that waltz, you find me now/Singing, dancing, with the moon”
“and Pastor speaks with God, while I/repent my youth that/like the flower which fades/has been my secret, golden calf.”
“What does it bring to light?/What meaning is there to land?/Have you killed a bit of me? I doubt it.”
“The silver lining is/you won’t be catching planes/to drag yourself away”
The light coming out of the street lamps, how it reaches out over the narrow little bit of beach, toward the water. The beach that’s made more of pebbles than sand, the pebbles that hurt your feet when you walked on them when the weather was warm enough to
“All those routines!/And unhappiness can be alike.”
“We should also be kind while we may.”
“More truths than cancer creep beneath our speech.”
“They bring us here, to a place/Elsewhere, where there is no motion”
“The citruses will still bear fruit, and if not these,/There will be others to form the soft flesh/Of oranges, new limes: all creating in their rot.”
“Yet the cold does not rest there.”
“Because there’s little more to friendship than warding off scurvy or having a catch.”
“Thinking leads to Hell. The way is wide…”
“The statistics were/like our scores—and we wanted/to lead the boards…”
