The Minus Space

Those things
Unspoken
Then
Add down

Down the camel’s back
Down the axle sunk
Down the heart’s annex

Those things
Add down
Unspoken
Into the minus space

Benediction for Poets

Commit then
To the endless

Wrangle with words
It is not

That words win
But that such partners

Ever prove
Lack to the task

Commit then
To the endless

Wrangle with words
All we hear

Of the heart’s song

Ten Commandments for Something or Other

I.

The essential religious category is the sacred

II.

The enemy of being is meaninglessness

III.

Being being as extravagant as the world

IV.

Transcendence being the ideal

V.

Which means ecstatic

VI.

And grounded community

VII.

Meaning in the self from outside the self

VIII.

Since the I is the Other

IX.

And nothing is not I

X.

There being no other

One Woman's Fire

One woman discovered
She could wipe away
Anything with fire
Make it disappear
Irretrievably—her

Husband’s sad fashions
Her mother’s love letters
From someone named James
Even the notes she herself
Should never have thought

Anything she could get
Into the grill and soaked
In sweet burning fluid
And some things she could not
More than a corner

At a time but with
Patience even those
One woman discovered
Could be wiped away
Irretrievably—with

Fire, with flame, even
Memories so harsh
Even those she discovered
She could wipe away
One corner at a time

Prosody

How many words
Does it take

To make
An elegant

Cry &
What’s an

Elegant
Cry &

How make it
Say

The loss

Triolet On the Course (of history)

Persons have made it up
Sometimes in brute force
Others in art but

Persons have made it up
Like pies made of mud
What else was the choice

Persons have made it up
Sometimes in brute force

After Chiao Jan, Monk

How is it
We talk the end

Before we hit the shore

It is the rowing

Autumn wind
Hard

On the water