The Spirit of Promise
By Poetry Issue 57
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…
Read MoreVisions of My Children
By Poetry Issue 65
In the dark I inflate balloons ———————————for my children it’s nighttime in the house ——————————-I lose my breath, they grow their aerial games, ———————-the threads on which they become acrobats their water shins luminescent hair ———————-their laughter issues forth or holds off, paper decorations on the walls, and the colors, loose folds on their wrists,…
Read MoreEmerson Mourns the Death of His Son
By Poetry Issue 82
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…
Read MoreOur Royalty
By Poetry Issue 82
The greatest evil is when you forget that you are the son of a king. —Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidism Yet, aren’t I the son of Joe Terman, used car salesman? And wasn’t he the son of Abraham Terman, carpenter, until injured by a salami truck, or was it a cable car, on Cedar…
Read MoreThe Rage of Peter De Vries: Reckoning with a Brokenhearted Humorist
By Essay Issue 83
IT WAS AN ORDINARY autumn night in suburban Chicago when I received the most disturbing book I have ever read. I was seventeen, slouching in my bedroom making a half-hearted attempt at homework, my sweaty cross-country clothes festering on the floor. My father appeared at the doorway and handed me a yellowed paperback that looked…
Read MoreArs Poetica: Baptismal Story
By Poetry Issue 83
My father thought the Anglican liturgy pure poetry, once, Three hundred people chanting in the multi-colors of the chancel, Saying on cue We do! Though they might have answered Otherwise in their own living rooms, together They committed to many things, the dignity Of every human being, the baby lifted high above My father’s head,…
Read MoreRowing for Shore
By Essay Issue 83
The following essay, in slightly different form, was delivered as a eulogy for Charles Hull Wolfe at his memorial service in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on November 23, 2014. LIKE MOST EARLY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES, mine are vague and fragmentary, faded snapshots that are probably half-invented, based on things my parents told me and the mind’s hunger…
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