More on: memory

THIS IS WHAT THINGS ARE LIKE HERE. The Palestinian fedayeen raids continue without mercy. Hardly a week goes by without a civilian being shot or ambushed in the Israeli Sector. Aubrey visits now and then, the young man’s face unalterably severe. He says there is a sense of foreboding in the air, a quiet dread,…

The first time I saw Denise Levertov was in the spring of 1973. She was the Elliston Poet at the University of Cincinnati that semester, and she was standing in the aisle prior to delivering the Elliston lecture. She was bent forward talking to someone seated at the end of a row of chairs. She…

London is a city of churches and my mother loved the church bells calling to one another over the rooftops. She said you could tell one church from another from the sound of the bells. The bells were that distinct, like human voices. The bells at Saint Paul’s overwhelmed her, just as the grandeur of…

Retrofitting Grace Cathedral, San Francisco Let my worship be this work and the force of each bit-strike on masonry. Forswear my doubtful tongue. Let my past words be what they are: failed elegies to the living word. Let praise be pain rejoicing. What rose like dust now falls and it is beautiful and meaningless and…

Amazing how the prayers come back, ———the cues to stand and kneel and sit, the hymns rising after so many years into the air of this small old church. ———We lean together in summer sunlight as the priest wafts past in an incense cloud and the small choir ———sings off-key in corner light. Yesterday you…

Reel rolling from the spliced-together lot of my past, this time around: senior year of high school, singsong voiceover of girls bowing to whatever she said, Yes, Sister/ No, Sister as still shots are superimposed on our faces: lone crow on a fencepost, cow silhouetted against late afternoon. Byron, Keats, Shelley—lining up to wander line…

Like a baker, swaddling the juice and heft of apples in pastry, I want my mouth to cradle the delicious name of God. Kissing the Torah, I breathe the dust that has lain on the name of God, imagine ink on my indrawn breath. I will dream myself into the body of a bee. I…

Thus this restless little butterfly of the memory has its wings burned now and cannot fly. —Teresa of Avila Char my wings. Lord, singe these cells of forewing, hindwing. Blacken memory’s sky blue shimmer, its thousands of cells— each startling pigment, each dorsal and ventral venation— the coppered glint of flight, oh Lord. If prayer…

I TELL MY mother lies. Sometimes three or four times a day. I lie mostly about money. That I’ve sent it or that I’m just about to send it. Or that surely I will send it tomorrow. My mother waits for money like the bums waited for Godot. One day she called seventeen times. So…

Eight, mouthy, and proud, you didn’t want his help, so while you watched the stairs revolve below your feet with every gust, your father watched you climb the last three flights dizzy, on your hands and knees, before your brother, crouched by the door, jumped out to scare you, and you missed the step. Which…