Hope

is larger than now, certainly
than angels, the heft of talismans, 
any pain or truth, 
and more miraculous than miracles, 
the natural world that crawls
across a leaf, generosity, or illusions.

Seek no deadline for hope, 
the counterpoint to time; 
when placed side by side, 
time becomes hope's predator. 

Published in the Westchester Review (2015).

Relativity

Sometimes the sun takes hours to shut down;
I go slower.
In that expansion of a celestial tilting, 
I go slower.

The Milky Way pushes its light years hulk
once around
each several hundred million years.

From birthday to ceremony,
season to remembrance, 
time alters its spaces.

And the ducks cross Canandaigua Creek
as they did when I was ten, 
counting them in their single line.

Published in Until Crazy Catches Me, Antrim House (2008). 

Supernovae

Theory cannot be tangible fact
like driving on I-95 to get to a lecture
on supernovae with pictures
of white dwarfs sucking mass, 
of others fusing hydrogen to their iron cores
before imploding to black. 
I'm delayed behind an accident, 
one car with a fender blown off, 
hanging on the median, driver pacing
the thin turf of tar shoulder, 
on a cell phone, mouth gaping
and closing rapidly, hands stitching, 
the story part factual, part theoretical. 

Published in Granta (2012) and Los Angeles Review (2017).
 

Measure

The things we try to map: 
one town taken in
from a railcar seat,
a sea absorbed
from a deck-side perch,
a distant mountain range
measured between fingertips,
the universe (let’s name it time) 
seeping through polished glass,
the mystery in myth,
moral boundaries formed in fables, 
and for infinity, ∞. 

Published in Literary Imagination (2012).