More on: Jeanine Hathaway

—five—six—seven—eight, and one— The dancers drum onstage from the wings where they were before the downbeat, that prehistoric moment, bandaged and flinching, calloused, split, grinning—the tick-swish of soles on bare wood; their presence shifts how light leaps off the watch of the ex-nun’s date. Such sound bodies. Their backs, extraordinary overlaps of muscle bound to…

The sexton lives in a big stone house. After supper he unlocks his church for a fee. Our tour group pays to climb past organ and choirloft, into the belfry where the daring grip a sheep-skinned knot and pull the rope straight down into a scene from the novitiate when I was in love with…

The sky clears like a good idea for a few blue hours sprung between industrial grays; it lures me out for a walk, unfurled and pumping, loose beyond my neighborhood. A child is taking advantage of the weather of expansion. He kneels on patchy lawn, kid businesslike, a box of wares and quick for sale…

In high-school Latin, I first read Augustine and wary could not, even threatened by grades, be made to care for his florid rhetoric or thieving of pears. Uphill I trudge from the Antonine baths Augustine must have known. The basement remains where puddles reflect fallen columns, their leafy capitals upside down. A corner maquette under…