Donna de la Perrière

Incarnation

such is Time

and because

we are fractured

and troubled

by it in equal

measure, every-

thing slips

through ¾

the fleeting

structure of

the world,

giving rise

to what we

are, which is

strange, elusive,

suffering

the vertiginous

course/force

of centuries ¾

holding this

in your hand,

dear reader,

observe

the universe

from within ¾

the churning

everything

that constitutes

stone, light, air

Noonday Demon 

to be creatures who love

we despair at what we lose ¾

in the solitude of the body

even faith cannot help:

no prophylactic or renewal,
no work of God or love ¾

perhaps the world

is best described

as distress that thrives

on air: it riddles

the body the way rust

weakens iron ¾

Saint Anthony

in the desert asked

how to differentiate

between angels

who came

to help and devils

in rich disguise
(he could tell, of course,

by how he felt

once they’d departed) ¾

Christ, the man   

of sorrows imagined

souls that warp

with grief, beheld

with clarity

a world in which

real knowledge

is intolerable ¾

death is, in truth,

a gradual category:

it is not that one

is lonely but that

all people are

The Cage        

                                An erasure of Tony Hoagland’s “The Change”

The         page                         

            glossy  the new          

            parade

The old world

            loved

the history

            you wore

                        to climb

her neck

Fenestra

all inceptions have their secret

sorrows: one was the story

of the bitterest day of

winter, the long road

(the whole world) 

hammering on the roof ¾

the aperture there,

excessive and mysterious,

its sawtooth coat wrapped

tightly around it ¾ that 

winter the phone rang

constantly with people

waiting, their despair

crackling with serrated

edges ¾ we perceived them

in plastic at the bottom

of our drawers, like lights

flickering in the body

of a darkened church,

as if we'd looked up to find

a world of wind

and trees walking,

the material

world too infinite

because God is

in everything