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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Canto

Just a few minutes to write a poem.
To let the blank page stare at me,
and I am empty,
empty as space,
as the vacuum with its rhythms of energy.
Photons from the stars,
memories from other places,
dreams lost and gone.
Can I catch up to them?
Let them reflect in my bodiless shape,
my shape as indistinguishable as a wind,
a falling thought?
Is that where it all goes,
to wander the infinite?
Among the furnaces of congealed atoms,
the stars,
and the black stars,
and the dust from the shovel of creation.

If I write a poem in the few seconds allotted,
where will it go?
On what wings will my heart
fall like a feather
in the flock of its doves?
The more we know
the less certain it becomes.
This pistol of paradise,
of entropy,
of matter forming its wires and becoming man,
or tree,
or replicating breath,
till it forms its museum of startling joy.
In the few seconds that I have been
sitting lonely in this place,
I have gone great distances,
but to where?
To where?

Published inIndex of all Poems