What Doves Talk About When They Talk About Love
                       “Pigeons know what love is.”—Architecture According to Pigeons

So, can it be the pigeon gets it right?
He secrets sonnets underneath his wings
and drops them into empty streets at night.
Don’t say you haven’t seen him on the spires
of great cathedrals, coupling by the choir,
pecking at the cross, nuzzling near the nave.
Look! Love is in the air and in the eaves.
The builders of these churches once believed
they’d crafted God Himself, His immensity,
His beauty set in mortar, glass, and stone.
If Heaven is a house—aisle, transept, crypt—
then all those pigeons perch on Holiness.
And you, beloved, can be a pigeon too:
a weightless, sacred thing inside the sky.

A Corpuscular Theory of Light

The farmer took the body from the stall.
He found the wire running down the wall,
the darkened light bulb resting in the straw.
What had the orphan tasted in the light—
the bright, raw bawls pulling her to pasture,
her mother’s milk, the sweet pale breath of God?
The farmer added all this to the list
of mysteries he’d never understand:
sliced seed potatoes turning in the soil;
the moon; his wife’s warm thigh against his own;
the way that need can be a humming wire,
desire, a naked bulb just out of reach,
and love, a dead calf in the hand of morning,
her belly offered to the coming light.

 HOME