More on: loss

Really, though, I’m struggling. Is it absurd to adhere to a religion whose most central rituals my body won’t even let me perform? What am I to make of all the parables in the New Testament where Jesus heals the crippled and the lame? And, most importantly, if I believe we’ll all eventually be resurrected back into the world, then is this body—this bruised, broken, wreck of a form—the one I’m stuck with for all time?

AMMA IS COMING to live in Richmond,” Mom announced one night at the dinner table. Elizabeth and I looked at each other quickly. Which of us would have to give up her bedroom? Immediately I began constructing an argument in my mind, listing the reasons why Elizabeth’s room would be more suitable for Amma—it was farther…

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…

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…