More on: loss

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

I am none the less
boundless this morning,

trawling, under your sway,
winter’s counterfeit cages

wracked & rife & caroled
by the catalogue of all

I do and must learn to love
beyond my power to stay.

After the snow stops and the sky opens cloudless over the mountains, and after three pairs of cardinals flutter back to our feeder, I stand by the kitchen window watching them as I did two years ago this week, talking to you on the phone, tube in your throat capped, strength, you said, coming back…

Under the catastrophic dark, the comet splintering the sky with its ancient grief, under the splay-handed palms, under drinks glowering dark in globes of glass, under the tender humidity, the phosphorescent surf, under the calls of nightjars chuckling up from the ground, under the ticking aloe under the moon’s absence, under, under, under. Under the…

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,…

One morning after the crucifixion, a Sudanese boy came to see his mother and father. He found his hut burnt to the ground. Two figures dressed in white asked him, “Boy why are you weeping?” “Because,” he replied, “they have taken away my family, and I do not know where they have laid them.” The…

Take, for example, This sunflower stuck in a vase. Its huge dark center daily sheds a load of pollen Onto the fake wood veneer of my desk, as if my desk Were dirt; this room, a field; the window, a planet’s Rectangular sky. The myth of ongoingness. We must assent, we do, The clouds rumbling…

1. MY LIFE HAS GOTTEN so unpleasant that I have to write it down. I’ve learned that nothing makes a bit of sense to me unless I write about it, like I’m getting old and can’t remember things or can’t see straight until it’s all spelled out in front of me. But that’s ridiculous; I’m…

Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful the Beloved (both from Copper Canyon). Long known for his condensed and crafted style, in his recent work, Orr demonstrates a shift toward the personal lyric at its most stripped-down,…

DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…