Category: Poem

Wastrel Words

Wastrel words, freely falling,
proliferate across the civic square—
each one a coin debased by minting,
spending itself before it’s there.

We talk and talk and fill the air
with syllables that cost us nothing,
the public tongue grown fat and dull,
its silences worth more than something.

What once was said with care and weight
now tumbles out, familiar, free—
a currency no longer backed
by thought, by blood, by what we’ve witnessed.

Speak less. Mean more. The word that waits
inside the throat, ungiven yet,
is richer than the thousand loosed
and already, mercifully, forgot.

The Icon

Gold ground. White horse.
The lance always descending,
the dragon always caught —
not slain, not winning,
that suspension my daily bread,
the point perpetually
at the point of.

I returned to it as to a chapel,
the dragons within
held by that stasis,
by what the icon
promised and kept.

Then —
the gold ground shifting,
the lance no longer
quite descending,
the dragon lifting —
St. George,
for the first time,
imperiled.

The always
became
was.

I am undone.

Gilt Wood, Oil on Panel

gilt wood
oil on panel
a moment eternal
light plays with shadow
color quickens flesh
the face outlasts its maker
the dead regard us still

Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) (detail)
Jan van Eyck, 1433
Oil on wood (oak), 26 × 19 cm

Return

evening crawls toward its end
heavy head leans to hand

eyelids closed tight
as mind drifts toward sleep

brief review of day
contemplation of what is to come

then silence
quiet
return

The Dervish and the Wave

Swirling waves, dervish-like in their intent,
divining direction beneath the moon,
the water neither wandering nor sent
but turning, as all turning things must turn
toward some still point the motion can’t explain —
the eye of every gyre a kind of prayer,
where salt forgets itself, freed of its name,
becomes the simple fact of moving: here,
and here, and here. The moon gives no reply.
She keeps her cold and distant office, draws
the deep in rhythms older than the sky
and older still than any naming laws.
So let the dervish and the wave agree:
to spin is not to search — it is to be.