Uncommon One in the garden of statutes where rules multiply like weeds & stones lie about like scruples every step is a misstep in misadventure my ways are not steadfast nor my path clear fallen fruits ripen towards a crisis break a snail underfoot & the roses shiver disaster crush a flower with your heel & the frogs croak catastrophe offend the sun with a dismal glance & the heron broods at the water’s edge disturb a duck egg in the thick grass & the elms grow misty all

Pillars of Ash In the beginning Nature had no voice. Then the gods threw a pest Of fire called language Upon the world And are watching it as it blazes. Now fire clings to the palate, Burns the throat. The smoke of rhetoric smarts our eyes. Tongues of fire consume the page — Paper curling into ash, Perusing fingers sifting to ash, Bodies stiffening into ash, Pillars of ash that’ll topple and disperse In the coming wind and rain.

Before the Clocks Struck Three (Mr. Eliot Had an Apparition in Salford and It Was Very Foggy) Salford is the rainiest place, getting Inside my shoes, wetting Tired feet in undarned socks. Yesterday, before the clocks Struck three, three old horses Munched wet grass Among the relics Of Clifton’s Wet Earth Colliery: Which on reflection, Were beautiful objects Of rust, time and toil. Fog swirls, curls Around the clock tower, The quays, the trees —

I See a Red Rose “I see a red rose” shows us three things – “I” – a simple fact of consciousness Or awareness; “See” – shows the sense Of our action. And, within that act Of seeing, we have The concurrence of perceptions (Color, shape, quantity, etc.) Considered as a single thing – “A Red Rose”. “I see a red rose” – You see, There’s nothing romantic about it.

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

Begin, Again, Finally Begin Organic bodies. Competitively divergent, Striving to maintain Separation. First creature, Rat. Disgusted, self-hating, heart-horrored. Ties a string-taut wire around his skinny neck And kicks the stool. Begin again Second, Vulture. Stupidly well-fed on pride, Invests heavy in guns, Gas, nightsticks and, supercritically, All the plutonium he can lay his talons on, Ending in his own atomization: The birth of stars. And again Snake.

Melville and the White Whale Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room, On the Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over I Write down This, My Heathen Language. Making waves. Much INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD Spilled to find the White Whale — Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia rem

Made of Light Everything is made of light. Everything is light, of differing gradations and qualities, from the big bang to the atom. Earth and sky are the light of God, and the spirit in man is a self-shining light. The light of lights is the true substance, and that substance is God. Art is the light of the imagination projected outward. Bodies are dark light, lacking luminosity, where “darkness is simply an expression for the lack of light.”

Not the growing stem or the leaf blowing in the wind; not the opening bud or the emerging radicle; not the fourfold root yearning for water.

In the Beginning Was Strange to think I am the universe and everything in it too. I call out. No voice returns other than my echo. So evidently, I am my own cause and, worse, horribly alone. Bored, I fall into a deep sleep and dream of many things: wave-like particles in plasma; diverse organisms, vertebrates and invertebrates; metals and gases; all kinds of finite bodies with perishable qualities, competing for succession and place and rank. Time passed and, with time, entro

Itself in Mind for the Future We see the visible world as somehow inevitable, with all its ratios of movement & rest, its manifold shapes & ecstatic forms, not realising that nature is always busy, acting unseen in all its power, without external cause, producing within itself its own effects, differentiating this idea from that idea, bypassing one potential in favour of another, & making actual a particular mode of being (a mutation, a thing, a body, a colour), while keeping

Sky It was at this point I stopped dreaming and looked at the sky and saw what seemed to me a mirage reflecting upon itself what it mirrored distinctly (the lake and the veiled mountain peaks) and descending, slowly, teasingly, as if desirous of making contact with the world it so perfectly expressed.

Death of a House Sparrow Scraping his toes in the fine dirt, the handsome house sparrow lowered his whitish belly to the ground, deepening the depression of a crater arid from drought. Flapping dust under his wings, beak pressed to chest, he dry cleaned his colours in the earth, expressing in movement the joy and power of God’s nature. Perhaps it was a pain or a sorrow that made him stop still, every nerve in his body petrified to its tip. I stoo

A Dark Thought in a Green Shade Somewhere in the newly planted earth, a god sits at his bench, creating and curating each little plant and flower. Day upon day he nurses roots, stems and leaves, talks to fragile saplings, puts to work all the surprising symmetries and fractals he dreams of when he sleeps for hours in the afternoon sun. Neither a Moses nor a Prospero, but looking like both, the god puts down his staff and exhales a fragrant cloud that veils the garde

God's Entropy (short version)

From Creator to Creature After the birds and mammals lost their speech (the serpent's tongue having already turned to ash) and Heaven swayed and fell to within four miles of the earth, a disappointed God crept low into the sea’s womb, into Mary, our lady of the ocean, and transmuted his glory into the microscopic, a millimetre in size, living between grains of sand on the sea bed, eventually emerging in the form of a fish.

Shaddai A plant grows from the Nile, the שׁ, primordial cause, rooted in the water, breathing in the air, the commencement of births, becomings, and of all flows.

Seven Worlds God turns -- and the fishes dance blue gold silver beneath a yellow sky. Another turn, the boughs of thick trees become as air: invisibly light. The third turn, nothing but pea-green lizard eyes and cochineal blood. The fourth, an angel with four faces tolls the caked air with a dead bell. At the fifth there is only a fagged-out planet and the light of dead stars. The sixth, and it is said, “the former worlds shall not be remembered.” The seventh, and the land r

A Skein of Black Water A Skein of Black Water The moon appeared to float on a skein of black water and a wind sang a high pitch B, 246.94 Hertz. And something else – a distant police car? Or a muffled bell tolling the lost river Dene?

Credit: Ahmed Abdul Rahman The Octopus and the Fisherman A lobster paralysed by venom makes a fine meal for the octopus, whose cephalopod beak pierces clean the lobster’s shell, splitting carapace from meat. And still the sea sings with foamy lips. If startled by shark or stingray, the octopus vanishes like magic — a puff of ink, or into coral colours it contorts, bonelessly alien. Still the sea sings with foamy lips. The fisherm