Poems

I’m smiling because a million possible alternatives which would have precluded this moment we’re sharing…

It is a simple garment, this slipped-on world. We wake into it daily—open eyes, braid…

Today, the sun-glazed bag of lemons adorning the white counter became in my imagination,…

This poem was written in 1996 for Br. David Steindl-Rast, after Br. David decided to…

Try to love everything that gets in your way: The Chinese women in flowered bathing…

I open the front door and walk headlong into the oh so heavenly scent of…

A WORD is dead When it is said __Some say. I say it just Begins…

Every morning when I was a girl my mother would wake me with song, the…

“Every great moral and spiritual tradition points to the truth that in the giving of…

Praise the shit-eaters, the revelers in rot, the chewers of soft wood, the gorgers of…

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, to remain,…

At fifty-three, I sometimes feel a subtle but irreversible sadness seeping into my blood. I…

Fearsome former Kings of Jungle, Recumbent now in peace you slumber, your toothless duty: guarding…

The artichoke sits on my plate A vegetable that begs debate The novice may but…

Two loons on a lake in the evening fog, air thick with it, pale water…

Only I know, only I see the light softly dancing over the canopy of trees….

Joy, my Life Mystery, my Partner Belonging, my Love Narrowness, my Encounter Fear, my Poison…

My grandmother gave me licorice as sacrament, a rite of passage when I was five….

You see the precious gift of ordinary things as Pablo Neruda did, but need no…

Here, where the rivers dredge up the very stone of Heaven, we name its colors—…