The mystics say to dig, hammer the cloud, dayand night. That the act of gazing at the long obsidian robe of God undresses unknowing. I

In the heat of summer as afternoonwears on as octogenarians care fortheir flower gardens & sprinklers jet across expanses of lawn the waterlevel in the

You ask me what I thought then. I thought what I think still—tokeep custody of my eyes and lips. If my mistress wraps fig cakes

Plenty of dented signs on the highway. Igloo photographs in the drawers on the left. I don’t know where the antidote is kept. Nobody came

The fog again –it hangs late this year,whitening the airthe way snow whitens the ground.Separating the city,it makes neighbours invisible,softening and dulling all of life.

The first flurries are falling,falling slowly. In the dark of morning,I reached into my shadow closetand plucked my wool sweater,the old one, with snowflakes. It

Sitting at the end of a lakeside dock,with solid cedar boards below my chairbut ever-flowing water underneath,I saw a cumulus cloud toweringlike a holy city

Those who look to you are radiant Sometimes I make the mistake of beingtoo corporeal-minded forgetting we’re predominantly made of lightmissing how like the moon’s

“On December 10, 1968, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and perhaps the most popular AmericanCatholic writer in history, stepped out of a bathroom shower during