Browse Topics

Selected Poems

Sunbeams

What does “car” mean? A car in a showroom, a car heading straight toward me, a car needing constant repair, all have such isolated meanings that the name “car” cannot be said to stand for any one thing. That too is true of Scott or John or Gayle. God is in them only when God is in my mind. Only love can see steadily, consistently. Love makes one thing of all that it sees.

Hugh Prather, There is a Place Where You Are Not Alone

Chapel Hill

An Elegy For Jesse Stroud

There is no precipitating event for this elegy. No anniversary. No birthday. No cause whatever, other than personal need. Jesse Stroud lived, struggled, and died. I do not purposefully vilify nor vindicate. Neither do I celebrate. Certainly not regret.

April 1980

Three

He abandoned desire. The flowers grew slowly around the hole in his chest. When his lover sighed, they trembled.

Too Much One Thing, Not Enough Somewhat Else

Release

I cannot write how it was. The world shifted me too fast with each event passing before me, inflicting my nerves with flash-bulb rapidity. I was quietly startled at the fresh novelty. Numb still to the fact I was leaving, disbelieving, an embryo in limbo, sins forgiven, the timelessness suddenly and violently meaning something concrete.

January 1979

Fathers

To let our parents be, to accept them as people, human and therefore imperfect, rather than as gods — that is the challenge.

Grandparents

A print that someone had jabbed holes where the eyes had been, The Secret Garden where the snow-drops bloomed, a pair of tweezers thrust into a hand

Blue

Selected Poems