More on: contemplation

Does your prayer cross the street? Or is it like the skin of the serpent Scratched against a stick or sharp stone? Does your prayer shred? Has your prayer Ever heard a man cry, or touched a woman’s fur? No prayer for the smashed teeth of Ai Wei Wei held against his will? I saw…

GALA BENT WAS ONCE a landscape painter who lived in Indiana, born and raised in the Midwest. Her paintings, acrylic on paper, featured dark, heavy, and flat horizontal spaces. But she used to dream about mountains. That is, until she found herself surrounded by them. When she and her husband, fellow artist Zack Bent, moved…

Awake in the middle of the night, the river cracked with language, the ice of it a heave of squares and oblongs. Only the waterfall, its cold spray frosting nearby juts of stone with lace, continued to tumble as if it would never cease to move and be. Once it was, we lay down together,…

Your name, Jesus, is childhood in the body, at times a single malt upon the tongue, Vivaldi to the ears; your name, Christ, forgiveness to the heart, acceptance to the flesh, a troubled joy across the soul; at ever my very best I will plead to you, closest to me, for kindness. Perhaps the silence…

Down the block, our new neighbors, not unlike the old, could be named the Grackles, given the way everything they have is loud: cars, children, stereos, parties. It all spills out into the street—broken bikes, pizza boxes, a nasty looking dog with nothing to restrain it but the owner’s curse. Giving the mutt wide berth,…

             And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.                                                    —Rilke So I could be a song. But a great song? Or a bluegrass tune with a decent chorus and a shift to the minor to savor every time, and a break I can almost…

He does not shampoo your carpet or show you how to brush it clean. He does not shower you with roses for Sunday’s wedding or funeral. He does not put his hand in your hair or ask if your spouse is at home. He only opens a book of words in two columns, one in…

                 Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It is what the law says. However, the summer of our prayers was one of grace in action. An outage from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon never occurred despite all the signs. I witnessed utility men working in the street as well…

You, who seek grace from a distracted God, you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it, you, good son of a race of shadows— your great fortune is to have a job, never ate government cheese, federal peanut butter— you, jerked…

IN JULY OF 2014 I went to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Utah desert, about two hours by car from Salt Lake City. Massive, remote, and seemingly useless, Spiral Jetty has the feel of a lost work—one so far out of sight as to be out of mind:  most of us don’t even…