More on: joy

Last words from death row. “I love you endlessly, my honeybird.”

. . . faith in the faith that the way the story ends
is not the story—

May some mercy find them both.

All the way to heaven is heaven, Saint Catherine of Sienna supposedly said, and on most days, replete with the stabbed, shot, run-over or into, the stroked, heart-seized, and cancer-stricken, I’d say bullshit and be done with it. But today, at the tail-end of April, the sun warming things up, I’m in shorts and a…

Brother, at your grave, we stood gathered under Thanksgiving trees bare with wind. When the words had been said, I expected silence to resume. But your pale fiancée placed an incongruous stereo on your new earth, pressed the red button and the brief world opened to song. I stood amazed as music broke forward. Stunned,…

What you want to do is turn around slowly, keeping your hands where everyone can see them, and a pleasant smile on your face. You want to confess to all who tracked you to this alley how you were forever afraid of being found out with a bag of wrong answers: To get to Peru,…

I will my soul to waken, and my soul does not wake. My mind busies itself, remembering forgotten songs from my adolescence. My mind recalls anything, so as not to listen. I will my hands to be calm, Lord, and they fly to my teeth to crease my nails. Lord, I will myself to be…

You enter that light which binds night and day, that swirling mist of pain, fortunate pain, which has no need to be seen. It shimmers on the ever-present, ever- inactual shore. Simple worker, like those who build men’s houses— Breathe life into the whirlwind where the dead shall find you, dear friends absorbed in daylight.…

Knowing life grinds us, And dust Is what we’ll become. Sensing, likewise, That the moral Of our story Has to do With being mortal. Yet love grounds us. And the beloved Grows in us: We are her slow cocoon. And the poem is a door; The song, a little window. § Bowed by a ceaseless…

A. The heart is a divided city Between two alphabets. Church bells, minarets Betoken Time has stopped where it is broken. Nothing forgets. This is called history, not pity, It is not spoken. B. To remember is to cross Through no-man’s land Into an imaginary country You do not recognize But where the streets are…