Our Earthly Eyes

Contents

Heaven

I Could Never Fathom Heaven

A Little to Keep Inside

God

Retirement

Perfect Mess

The Suspect

Pair of Feet

Life and Death

Solution

Vineyard Sonata

Genius

Remember

The Sail and the Moon

Personal Stalker

Simplifications

Promoting Death

Holy Spirit

Church [Inspired by Emily Dickinson]

Reality

A Suicide Pleading Before a Jury in Heaven While in Hell

The Blind Date

The Poet’s Gift

Fragment

The Answers (haiku)

God has No Color

Then It Should Begin

Then Don’t Ask

Somewhere

The Meaning

A Stream of Consciousness

Ode to the Star-catchers

[R.I.P. Emily Dickinson]

First I Will Be Autumn

I Heard the Call

Earth

O God, My God

Element of Change

Shooting Star

Drowsy

Finished

Priorities

Do Not Wake Me

Pain has a Route

Brooding

I Want to Be Free

Earthly Eyes

Humans

The Painter and the Paintee

A Battle in the Sky

An Island

The Rain

Winter Breath

The Womb of Seasons

The Hardest Look

On the Verge

Summer Day

Hummingbird

Autumn. Again.

Grandfather

Alice

I’m Sorry

School Room

The Heart

Cross Pollination (haiku)

Love Ache

Ode to Time I

Desires on a String

I Met a Steinway

Please

Ode to Walls

The Lone Art

Word

The Worst

A Proposal

Poetry Differs

Water and Poetry

Self-Assault

Backyard

To Disappear

What is Night?

Poetry Used to Be

Explaining

My Overture

Becoming a woman...

To Fellow Poets

A Broken Compass

The Days When Poetry Drags

January 20, 2009.

The Decision

Pain is Beautiful Like

Apologizing

Spring’s Coming

Dying for the Mystery

Missing Child

Perhaps the Poet Writes

Gray (senryu)

Curtains

Mountains

War Days

Poet’s Block

The Beach Sunset

I Knew Beauty

Thrice

Do you Know of Love

All We Want to Do

Buzzing Bee

Tree Barks

Liberty to Cry

1:00 A.M.

When it Kills You Slowly

Afraid of the Sea

On War

That Feeling

Us

I Was Made

You Are

Spoiled

A Man to a Woman

In Love

When Men Don’t Love

How Human You Are

The Rumors of Love

I Loved Love

Old Friend

I Am Afraid to Breathe

Brilliant Eye

Winter is a Promise

When Saying ‘No’ to Love

Distant Relationship

Overdue

Tall Love

To a Friend

Only Fame

The Prediction

Missing in Action (M.I.A.)

Frail Women

Can I Simply Say?

For So Long

for Jackie Johnson

Lie

Subway

Absence

Even the Roses

We Are Close

She Caught Stars

My Ache, My Irony

Secret

Your Nomadic Heart

Suicide

In a Certain Angle of Light

Love’s Dialogue

Last Night

Let You Go

I Held the Sun

Sparkling Cider

Hypothetically

Silly Love Talk

I Loved You

StayClose

Friend (senryu)

A Pail

Tulips (haiku)

End of the Tunnel

Smile for Me

But I Do

I Cannot Love You

Kind You Are

To My Journal

This Obsession

Peer Inside

Overdue

Breakfast and Reconciliation

Carousel

for Mary Hannah McWilliams

This is Romance

Aging Together

Your Eyes Tell Me Things

Singing My Song

I am

Down the road and up

the hill

I wait for you still

Wires ‘round my fingers

Potentially lovely

Perpetually human

Suspended and open

Open

— Regina Spektor

Heaven

I Could Never Fathom Heaven

I could never fathom heaven,

while myself still treaded earth.

But I know my epoch of disbelief,

will, like my living, be reversed.

Is it faith that worry grows here?

that my doubts shall amount to no worth?

While my knowledge is still fed,

there shall be no mirth?

God expected of me, his child,

unseeing whole-hearted belief,

which I did, which I could,

besides the waver and it being brief.

But I have hope! And I know the truth,

that my incredulity,

will once it’s being in heaven disappear,

and break my penalty.

A Little to Keep Inside