[I strive to live as if…]
By Poetry Issue 91
I strive to live as if I were going to die tomorrow. The steady breathing of my sleeping wife, the taste of gherkin, the odor of soil and of dill, of smoke suspended over the fields, the sight of a couple necking on the dunes —that’s too much. They say that every day brings us…
Read MoreRomanian Orthodox Choir
By Poetry Issue 91
This chasm. Quite simply, the abyss. Gale in a sultry church. Out of the dark the voices of seraphim. A beauty impossible to bear. A theology of opposites: in Christmas hymns this sorrow like a lidless coffin. Humble, the unknown soloist folds his hands and bows his head in gratitude for the applause. Suddenly we’re…
Read MoreOld River
By Essay Issue 55
Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…
Read MoreThe Fruit Thereof
By Poetry Issue 83
Hold the phone, it wasn’t an apple, apples have seeds and seed-bearers, check, perfectly fine in vegan Eden, nor does the story name the fruit, botanical paradox, fruit without seed, which even those grapes, supposedly seedless, have at some stage, albeit vestigial, and if the tree delighted her eyes, then Stevens was wrong, beauty in…
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