Can the aesthetic life lead us to God?

Later, looking at his partially closed eyes, she suddenly remembered a creole word from the country where she had spent her childhood. Sodade. A mixture of nostalgia, tenderness, and yearning, a sense of the fragility of happiness.

From the night woods, wild things come to possess
The fields they’ve lost to human violence
And savvy, as the dark itself returns to bless
The troubled mind with sleep.

My wife
Is reading D.H. Lawrence and says she wants to get a tattoo. She says that I’m not “deep,”
And maybe she’s right.

On her last visit to the hospice, my niece
watched a flock of red-winged blackbirds
settle in the tree outside the window,
as if waiting for my mother to join them.
My brother, the pastor, calls this a God wink.

It had been four months since we’d run out of money. Somehow, we were still afloat.

You flinched a moment ago when you thought
you heard unseasonable thunder.
Like a judgment.

of God yes by the but
not there but for the

act of yes acts of but
not a given state of

Faith’s a dissonance, a forgetfulness.

Eileen felt that she should deliver the news of her brother’s death in person. She knew she would provide no solace when the time came, that her presence would only heighten the reality of Brandon’s absence; yet her mother was nearing seventy.