More on: humanity

Mr. Moore, who drank; his oldest son paid the bill without looking at me. The apartment with the dog who ate two paperboys, leaving only their shoes. The Morrows who once paid me with a hundred-dollar bill, keep the change. The Sunderlands, who wanted the paper unfolded and laid flat under a stone, Which I…

I am not washing the window. I am not looking. I am not afraid. I am not dancing. I am not washing the window no matter how dirty. I am not buying bread today or milk or eggs or honey. I am not washing the window, ash and rain streaking. I am licking the pane…

The Psalmist said, “Lord, how shall I not call thy name?” The hills were green with his wonder and the birds flew filled with singing, so he sang, “Lord, how shall I not know thee upon the mountain when thy sheep are the great stars of heaven, thy horn the sun and moon, and all…

An Apprenticeship in Affliction: Waiting with Simone Weil   I DOUBT there is a twentieth-century figure who has inspired more poetry than the French philosopher-mystic Simone Weil. Though her writings were few and fragmentary, their utterly unconventional, severely brilliant insights and her absolute fidelity in living out her own precepts have moved poets to produce…

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…

IN COLD WAR-ERA AMERICA, one of the more remarkable cultural developments was the efflorescence of visual arts programs in colleges and universities. This unprecedented expansion from 1945 to 1990 was launched even as most Americans remained indifferent, skeptical, or hostile to the rise of modern art. The upsurge in academic art programs attracted artistically inclined…

Hold the phone, it wasn’t an apple, apples have seeds and seed-bearers, check, perfectly fine in vegan Eden, nor does the story name the fruit, botanical paradox, fruit without seed, which even those grapes, supposedly seedless, have at some stage, albeit vestigial, and if the tree delighted her eyes, then Stevens was wrong, beauty in…

In the past, I have asked for what this may be,             more faithfully perhaps, haven’t I, for some covenant of intimate favor             waiting along a byway? So how then should it be seen, what begins as just             a blue, late morning crease between heavy rains, noticing the usual roadside toll             of…

From nothing God made everything, they said. Nothing plus God is nothing we said. But with something to work with, look what we’ve done. God said, you’d better and you’d better not, they said. And sometimes it looks like you have when you shouldn’t. Eyewash, we said, it’s just how we are, honeyed self-interest in…