Category: Poetry

Stendhal wrote, beauty is “the promise of happiness.” Thus beauty is conjectural, enigmatic, a stand-in for longing — that delectable neurosis. I would tell you its impact on or relation to my poetry, but then I would have to live up to my delusion.

… Beauty is the back door with white spider webs in the corners I open and see the sun over that high grass and I am only three and lift my arms to that warm light thinking that’s where I came from. Beauty is a face in a shroud in a cloud in a crowded market, a deaf-mute handing me a pamphlet that says Blessed are the Thankful as I’m picking out an avocado.

Beauty works up desire. Looking down an aspen valley in color from a mountain pass, one cannot hope to possess what they see, but they are compelled to return. When a poem lets beauty in at the eye–like love in the Yeats’s Drinking Song–or by the ear, the perceiver gains the pleasure of wonder that slowly sweeps through them, ever elusive.

For the women clutching reeds, leavened bread and precious wine,
may there be many birds casting seeds through the wind.
May each meal be wild with honey melting on the soft muscle
of your tongue.

I am writing for time, clarity, the lucidity of parsed
moments. I am writing to leave a small fossil that
says I lived pressed into the medium that killed me.