In The Poetry

And there is a scene in the Bible where, many centuries later, the Ark is being brought into Jerusalem, and David is dancing as it’s being carried into Jerusalem, and he is described with the phrase “and David danced before the Lord with all his might”. When I read that phrase as a boy, [...]

O Many Named Beloved
Listen to my praise
Various as the seasons
Different as the days
All my treasons cease
When I see your face

One needn’t know the specific part of the Bible to which the poem alludes but even people who don’t know about the Promised Land, when they hear this poem they seem to know it, it reaches them even though they don’t know the Bible.

At the edge
Of a world
Beyond my eyes
Beautiful
I know Exile
Is always
Green with [...]

I love the fact that the name Adam comes from the Hebrew word Adomah, which means earth or ground. He was given the name of the substance of which he was made. If the soul is in the name, then there’s a wonderful unity of body and soul.

Adam Means Earth

I am the man
Whose [...]

Voyage

Water opens without end
At the bow of a ship
Rising to descend
Away from it

Days become one
I am who I was

I don’t introduce myself as a poet if I am at a gathering – it’s an embarrassing category, most people don’t read poetry, most literary people don’t read poetry – but if I’m introduced as such I can’t deny it. On the part of total strangers half or a third my age, there’s a [...]

I love the phrase ‘The Living End’ – I don’t know whether it’s known in all places, but as I know it it’s not judgmental; when you call somebody “He’s the living end” or “It’s the living end”, he’s eccentric but he’s benignly accepted, he’s not severely judged.

Before long the end
Of the beginning
Begins to [...]

There’s no etymological connection between ‘ink’ and ‘inklings’ but I was intrigued by the fact they seem so close in the first syllable.

Inklings

Inklings sans ink
Cling to the dry
Point of the pen
Whose stem I mouth
Not knowing when
The truth will out

Then I also, after ‘Self Employed’, sometime later wrote ‘Curriculum Vitae’ and at the end of it I allude to something that Yeats said (close paraphrase if not the exact words): he said “rhetoric comes from the quarrel one has with the world, and poetry comes from the quarrel one has with oneself.”

‘Curriculum Vitae’

1

Scribe [...]

There’s that skull that monks – at least as we see them in paintings – had on their tables to remind them of death.

‘Memento Mori’

This skull instructs
Me now to probe
The socket bone
Around my eyes
To test the nose
Bone underlies
To hold my breath
To make no bones
About the dead