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Through the gates of eternity I’ll ride On a grasshopper huge and green. ————————–—Egils Plaudis don’t beckon yet! I don’t yet want to ride to you on the back of a huge grasshopper I still want to linger here among various earthly substances still want to see how the wind sweeps away slogan after slogan…

Eyes set into the ridgepole, the house peers down at the man. Now and then the ears tremble, Such sensitive, discerning walls: love one minute, invective the next, then fist-pounding panic. God is touched by the house the man has made, God whose eyes peer down from the ridgepole of the world. The house begs…

After I decided the spectacular sewer pipes planted with hens and chicks were too tacky to keep, I started to love those succulent single moms, also called common houseleek and long ago planted on thatched roofs to protect homes from lightning bolts. Stone rose, sacred to Jupiter in the south, Thor in the north, emblem…

The following excerpt is from the novel A Blessed Snarl, forthcoming from Breakwater Books in 2012.   THE WEATHERMAN’S HAND sweeps from Labrador down Newfoundland’s fanged north coast to Saint John’s, his finger squiggling from there down to Renews: the sea white against green land. He’s talking about winds rifling in from the north. The…

Because the crab apple tree is not incarnate, but a shape cut from sky, you simply pull its trunk a little wider and step through. Once on the other side, you turn, take stock, lean on a bough, and look back at it all. So strange to catch your own life unawares, to see your…

The Word-Soaked World Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful of…

At secret slumber parties, Ruth and Ruby burst out of back rooms transformed. Their own version of ascension: loosed hair fanning pubic bones, shrieking louder than the rest of us. No bonnet, no beckoning church. Strong legs in borrowed Levi’s, our lipsticks strewn through sleeping bags. § From stolen stacks of their brothers’ outdated films…

Night shift on Rine #4 with three thousand feet of drill pipe churning Oklahoma rock, the mud pump’s wheeze and suck, hammer of warped deck plates beneath my boots as I gaze from the rig’s north end upon treeless, dust-bowl no man’s land. The moon slithers under clouds that go all sullen and spread a…

She is a mother first—in every church she lights a candle for her harrowed son. One already lit supplies the match. Today San Stefano, above her stretched a heaven of dark keel vaulting. Here an icon, Byzantine, true presence in the church of the second Eve, the mother she beseeches. She gives a euro to…