More on: death

MY DEAREST KATIE, Do you remember that evening we flew together from Burlington in Vermont to Saint Paul in Minnesota? Do you remember how the wind came in off Lake Champlain and cut through the streets of Burlington like a sawblade, the snow blistering somewhere out over the lake? We flew just ahead of the…

So much sitting still these past months, hoarding my sorrows, looking out at another day’s news- paper being buried by the accumulating snow. I could be waking from a half-remembered dream that, no matter how I try, I’m unable to put together, my daily sighs a kind of catch-all for the poverty of everything I…

Our speaker has a tongue screw with him, though it is a replica. He speaks of spectacle, witness, dying well. One group’s criminals…. Stories are not preserved by accident. Heroes are made necessary by the nature of memory. Life is stronger than death, and that is why we must praise. I think. Identity depends on…

I have love And a child, A banjo And shadows. It was the light, always the light. First, that absent early hour when he woke to find the world made strange, knocked awry, as if creation had suddenly undone itself, the landscape dishonored by this loss. The dawn moved haltingly toward day. He would have…

1. AUNT MORAVIA SAID that she had swallowed a glass piano. She was my father’s aunt, a stitch of an old woman. She’d come to live with us when I was seven and my brother Robbie fifteen. Mother had been bedfast for a month before the birth of my sister. In the meantime Aunt Moravia saw to…

If you have no voice after reading Rumi     to a dying man you hardly know, this is a good and timely thing. Pay attention. If you’ve sworn to stay at the hospital     for two days, end up staying ten, you are the wind that rocks me forward. There are lights in the city…

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography by Richard Rodriguez (Viking, 2013) White Girls by Hilton Als (McSweeney’s, 2013) Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, 2013) THE DUSK OF A SUMMER EVENING in London’s Hyde Park, years ago. Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, is misidentified by a woman he’s passing on the street. She smiles. “Arabie?” The author…

The sun turning to sackcloth means nothing to see here; all the sheeted corpses look the same. The moon surging with blood equals the deaths your butterfly wings effected while you slept. And the stars sizzling at your feet like Epsom salts are his way of saying you’ve lost your chances with time and space.…

You say you will never forsake us then send a horse the color of decaying flesh to wipe out a fourth of the earth. God does not will woe, the pastor says. Disaster unfolds from our own misdeeds. We sing, lift hands. The drummer kicks out mercy and grace. But I still see the horse…

You were born a swath of frost in the clover, nudged up on icicle legs. Now you cut through men like a derecho, sulfur and Sodom in your nostrils, entrails winding your hooves. I am trying to believe that God doesn’t will destruction, that out of love he allows our terrible freedoms to gallop across…