Some days the song of the small enclosure
takes you a little farther, deeper, less
by way of what it says, than how it shudders,
how it lends a body to the chaos,
a mirror to the air, blood to the hands
we lace in thought, as if to reconcile
a grief with what we cannot understand.
Some days a whisper shakes the heart’s cathedral.
Not because our prayer is large. More
because it feeds a silence that is larger.
Come closer, say the atoms of the echoes.
Be small. Pull a chair to the fire,
to the pulse’s will to proceed, to listen,
to close our eyes and tear the darkness open.
is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), and Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L. E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017). Five books are forthcoming: Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions), Scar (Etruscan Press), and Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU). Presently, he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.
