More on: faith

A family lives here, here things are a bit wild, yes, I’m trying to maintain, give me grace, please, look, there’s beauty in the attempt—and all of this is not only the subject matter of the yard, but the aesthetic, let’s call it, an aesthetic of too-muchness, or, as in a line from a poem I jotted down in my commonplace book, “the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.”

I think of my chest like the inside of a grand piano, each key triggering an invisible response in the instrument’s body, releasing some build of pressure within an anatomy of hammers and strings. I think about writing. It’s always a gamble to live life without writing everything down in real time—the fear of what will be forgotten haunted by anxiety over what’s already been lost. A train of inkblots surfaces behind my eyes and disappears just as quickly, like music. I try to resist reaching for metaphors, attaching any images or words that would put distance between myself and the moment as it’s happening. I try not to feel like a failure.

our hearts labor at salvation
despite our honest efforts to resist

After the George Floyd murder and protests, painter Askia Bilal began a series called Non-Portraits, exploring his experience of Blackness.

Faith’s a dissonance, a forgetfulness.

Give me proof, said Thomas,

and he could see a hole in the palm before him,

and inside the wound a glimpse