Yes even when I don't believe there is a place in me inaccessible to unbelief a patch of wild grace a stubborn preserve impenetrable pain untouched sleeping in the body music that builds its nest in silence. from Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska

Mother of Sorrow, Mother of stars and night fires, arroyos, tossed tequila bottles, the dead drunk. Mother of the streets, of the violent, weekend golfers, cut off, and a windshield smashed with bare fists; the knife, the absurdity, the day in court. Mother of amphetamines, the aging speed freak, who looks to kick around an oval track in a beat up stock car. Mother of

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla From too much love of living, Hope and desire set free, Even the weariest river Winds somewhere to the sea— (Algeron Charles Swinburne) But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope? —so much is in bud. How can desire fail? —we

It hovers in dark corners before the lights are turned on, it shakes sleep from its eyes and drops from mushroom gills, it explodes in the starry heads of dandelions turned sages, it sticks to the wings of green angels that sail from the tops of maples. It sprouts in each occluded eye of the many-eyed potato, it lives in each earthworm segment surviving cruelty,

Wind whistling, as it does in winter, and I think nothing of it until it snaps a shutter off her bedroom window, spins it over the roof and down to crash on the deck in back, like something out of Oz. We look up, stunned—then glad to be safe and have a story, characters in a fable we only half-believe. Look, in my surprise I

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water to solace the dryness at our hearts. I have seen the fountain springing out of the rock wall and you drinking there. And I too before your eyes found footholds and climbed to drink the cool water. The woman of that place, shading her eyes, frowned as she watched—but not because she grudged the water, only because

I want a god as my accomplice who spends nights in houses of ill repute and gets up late on Saturdays a god who whistles through the streets and trembles before the lips of his lover a god who waits in line at the entrance of movie houses and likes to drink café au lait a god who spits blood from tuberculosis and doesn’t even

When I was the stream, when I was the forest, when I was still the field when I was every hoof, foot, fin and wing, when I was the sky itself, no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever wondered was there anything I might need, for there was nothing I could not love. It was when I left all

The history of the cosmos is the history of the struggle of becoming. When the dim flux of unformed life struggled, convulsed back and forth upon itself, and broke at last into light and dark came into existence as light, came into existence as cold shadow then every atom of the cosmos trembled with delight. Behold, God is born! He is bright light! He is