More on: fear

I am much comforted by ordinary things by the whalebone covers of my missal sadly worn and warmer to my hand than amber or by the cry of gulls greedy as pagans for the bread we throw on seas so troubled and so terrible I am amazed God made them except I stand upon a…

Three dreams and modernity appear in the scene, hand in hand with misgiving: November 10, 1619 A phantom touch and the soul folded on its lungs and dragged its good half leftward, heart over foot, wheezing and shamed. The phantom mouths blew around and blinded the soul and spun it on its foot like a…

Years ago somebody decided—I don’t know how this conclusion was reached—that the most beautiful phrase in the English language was cellar door. —Don DeLillo, interviewed in the Paris Review, 1993 i. cellar door / cellar door ———————–Two solid wooden doors hinged to open out leaning on a sloping ledge against the house. Within, a wooden…

The wires between house and garage could slice you as you fall, ladder a useless set of rungs; the mailbox could impale you, so I implore: no roof chores. When it’s gutter time, I stand beneath the ladder, uncertain anchor. My father, blond child, held his position as ladder-bracer, even when my grandfather threw chunks…

Gauzed shine on the infinite, the moondog blooms like a distant searchlight left of the moon, almost unmoving to the naked eye, as if tracking a slow-drifting object, like one of the balloons wafting into North Korea, balloons with winter socks tied to them, or one of Chagall’s ethereal blue bodies above a nameless Russian…

Once in the desert he said he saw the shape of a man, a body, the line around it neither light nor dark standing speechless in his path. That he could feel his shirt draw back against his body his mind was already giving back to fear until the figure turned to yield and let…

From my car I watched with dread the woman who had raged at the meeting, condemned us all, heading toward the car I’d nicked on the way in. My daughter hiding in the back, “I’m scared” coming from the balled-up shape of her. Trembling a bit myself, I got out of my car as the…

Love’s last urgency is earth and grief is all gravity and the long fall always back to earliest hours that exist nowhere but in one’s brain. From the hard-packed pile of old-mown grass, from boredom, from pain, a boy’s random slash unlocks a dark ardor of angry bees that link the trees and block his…

SINCE ACCIDENTALLY BEING LOCKED inside Carmody’s Used Books, I’ve slept badly. In the mornings I manage a bright if groggy farewell as my husband gives his suit pockets a preflight pat and the kids shrug into school backpacks. Alone, I pour myself more coffee and read—the newspaper, catalogues, reviews in the alternative weekly, passages of…

In a room at the side of the hand-painted santuario, with its seven-foot cross found glowing one day in the red desert dust, a row of crutches left behind, and walls of photos of the children for whom we pray. Their baby shoes. Their army uniforms. Ourselves in them. Ordinary pains, unending in time as…