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,

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

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

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

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.