How Poems Happen

Many poems are the result of deciphering silence. Some poems are the result of deciphering noise.

Why I Am a White Racist 

Because I have a skin. Because my skin is a particular color. Because the color is called white. Because white is privileged by custom. Because the custom is enforced by law. Because the law is on my side. Because I must do very little to be judged right. Because I...

Votive Candles

I didn’t believe then. I don’t believe now. Not in the efficacy of votive candles lifting prayers to heaven on small waves of heat. But in the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourviere on a hill high over Lyon, France, the praise of city traffic rumbling below, the Rhone...

The Trouble with Bodies

If we could lose the body, skip it out over the flow of eternity like a flung stone skimming a river, shrug it off like a chip on the shoulder, remove it like a sweater of hungry holes needing to be fed and fed. Without the body we would not need politics, we would...

The Monk

In an airport waiting for flight, surrounded by others also waiting for flight, none of us present in the vast glass and steel sprawl, all of us already on to elsewhere, I saw a young man who did not look the part, sitting stone settled and still in his suit and blue...