Somewhere on the internet
After a virtual tour of Bruges
With still, austere pictures of
Canals and Gothic towers
Downloaded in cyberspace
You ponder God and transgression
But soon you are distracted,
Ready for a chat in Tokyo.

From your window
You watch the white sky and
Withered branch blasted by winter
And become moody, disconsolate,
Quarrelsome over trifles,
Not fully knowing it is the rage
And sorrow of premature grieving,
The half-buried fear of a loss so deep
That even if you were exiled to the coldest star
You could not be more alone.

A love unspoken
Where is it?
Does it rest in silence
Behind closed lips
Or flash out in the eyes
And inform each gesture?
If it is not seen,
Does it exist?
Is it interred in a tomb
Left to decay
Or is it a fire
Noiselessly burning?

When the bomb goes off
And the walls blow out
And the sturdy floor cracks
In the shock waves
The comfortable furniture
You were so used to
Broken and useless
For support
Amdst the debris
And your disloyal
Body goes its own way
In the conflagration
You have the core
Residuum
Left in the white light
And capacious space
The perception
The reckoning
The mercy

Annunciation

A Flemish angel
With a girl’s face
Entered the enclosed room
In silence
Like a wisp of smoke
The mirror showing only
The flowing curls of the Virgin's hair
And the light on a pewter dish.
Beyond the windowpane
The gabled roofs, the marketplace.

White-Bone Meditation

A skull unearthed
Jaw hung agape
As if its former tenant
Could express shock at death.
It’s the same story
Larvae, puss, putrefaction
The settling of an old score
A lingering debt renewed
With each birth
A harvest of souls brought forth
Naked, picked clean
Like the sound of a harpsichord
As it trills upward.

What if
Your neighbor suddenly was
A skeleton, knocking on your door
With bony knuckles?
Or your good friend, a grinning
Visage of bone and teeth?
What if the whole street, the town,
The world were filled with skeletons:
The young woman seductively swaying
Her exposed pelvis, the busy
Executive holding a cell phone
To a non-existent ear,
Skeletons in restaurants devouring
What’s left of flesh
Skeletons in court passing judgment
On themselves,
Skeletons lusting after other bones?
Would you have compassion?

God's first language is silence.
St. John of the Cross

As in Zurbarán,
Silence and light pervades--
The citrons, the oranges,
The rose poised on the silver saucer--
They speak the words of form and light,
Of hidden holiness,
Of stillness,
Eternity in a cup,
A wicker basket.