More on: Poetry

(from Hopkins’s journal of a vacation on the Isle of Man, August 1872) So much need in that “Again.” To see it in good weather. To look down again from the cliffs at the high water of a full tide. To hold the kaleidoscope of the waves to his eye and watch them churn and…

All the way to heaven is heaven, Saint Catherine of Sienna supposedly said, and on most days, replete with the stabbed, shot, run-over or into, the stroked, heart-seized, and cancer-stricken, I’d say bullshit and be done with it. But today, at the tail-end of April, the sun warming things up, I’m in shorts and a…

Jonah 2:10 I knew a whale in California who said it was a descendant of the great fish God prepared for Jonah. On the darkest nights when everyone felt alone, it told great stories of the great fish. Often, it would chuckle as it spoke of its ancestor. The young whales would honor it by…

A meditation before the Madonna del Parto of Piero della Francesca 1. I speak to you, Lady, in words of my time still new as the boy’s laughter as he cut this morning’s bread. You sway a little, in the soft shadows where you dwell, like a boat painted inexpressibly blue. To speak of that…

If she had said, No, The world would not have stopped: Birds would have flown high still into sky, The heavens would have proclaimed his glory And the firmament the work of his hands. We would have gone on reproving him, Unaware of how deeply down His love might plunge into our affliction, Unaware of…

A. The Moroccan Quarter, Jerusalem¹   Will that museum, the Museum of the Wailing Wall, ever welcome a swallow, or shake the hand of the Mediterranean, _________________as Cadmus and Ulysses did? Will it ever bring a woman back to life, the woman Europe was named after? Peace unto you, human steps, _________________you have become an…

Called crimson, called vermilion—“little worm” in both the Persian and the Latin, red eggs for the carmine dye, the insect’s brood crushed stillborn from her dried body, aswarm in a bath of oak ash lye and alum to form the pigment the Germans called Saint John’s blood— the saint who picked brittle locusts for food,…

Not green as new weeds or crushed juniper, but a toxic and unearthly green, meet for inking angel wings, made from copper sheets treated with vapors of wine or vinegar, left to oxidize for the calligrapher. When it’s done, he’ll cover calfskin with a fleet of knotted beasts in caustic green that eats the page…

“I have come to love you in spite of—” ―Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng   straddling the windowsill                   watching morning glimmer from the terminal spectral gray         becoming blonde as coffee cools     here near where                   chirrups erupt       whoosh of man hosing down cleft sidewalks               raising wraiths of spray against loops of barbed wire…

For God is in heaven, and you upon earth. —Ecclesiastes 5:2 Don’t take your eyes off the road. Accept nothing as given. Watch where you put your hands. You’re here and God’s in heaven. Be careful where you step. The drop-off’s somewhere near. The fog won’t lift tonight. God’s in heaven. You’re here. That word…