More on: Daniel Donaghy

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…

I’m thinking again of Pandora and the box, of the boy committed to stopping her until she undid her golden braids and got her way. He’d wanted to open it, too, but he’d made a promise to a friend, and for a while the promise was relevant. I’m thinking of irrelevance, of word and spirit…

After the snow stops and the sky opens cloudless over the mountains, and after three pairs of cardinals flutter back to our feeder, I stand by the kitchen window watching them as I did two years ago this week, talking to you on the phone, tube in your throat capped, strength, you said, coming back…

Huge hunks of the silver maple we’d just cut down killing the grass, trunk pieces split into quarters a good hundred pounds each, and my father’s start with the trouble in my head again as I loaded the biggest ones into the wheelbarrow, metal scrape and sawdust, tightrope balance to the woods’ edge, then back…

was what our nuns called it, the bread of angels, the Lord’s supper on the eve of his pure and holy sacrifice, their black habits hovering over us like threats, always the rosary dangling from a curveless hip, always chalk dust swirled on the cracked blackboard, above which the patron saints sat awaiting our prayers…