More on: love

My beloved son, I received your letter where you spoke to me like an adult told me all about how hard you studied at school and where I saw that your passion for learning chased all the darkness and ugliness away as you delved into the secrets of the big book of life You’re confident…

Where is the Garden of Eden? Can I see it from the hotel, east-facing room on the eighteenth floor? Does the 18 bus stop there? My children, I think, they must have grown up in the Garden of Eden while I was away with work, eighteen-hour nights and days. Look—their radiant faces! Listen—their voices, sweet…

One of the real tests of writers is how well they write about smells. If they can’t describe the scent of sanctity in a church, can you trust them to describe the suburbs of the heart? _____________________________________ ___________ —Diane Ackerman For your love is more delightful than wine. Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;…

“I have come to love you in spite of—” ―Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng   straddling the windowsill                   watching morning glimmer from the terminal spectral gray         becoming blonde as coffee cools     here near where                   chirrups erupt       whoosh of man hosing down cleft sidewalks               raising wraiths of spray against loops of barbed wire…

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves…

IN A SCENE from book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve talk one evening of the glories of Eden and their unmerited free creation by God, unaware that they are being watched by Satan. This little scene takes place shortly after Satan’s shape-shifting arrival in Eden and serves as a kind of foreshadowing…

lets go of his cane and holds with both hands the pew ahead of him. Now and then he dips down, shaking, pulls himself back up. Stands still as he can while the gospel’s read. Today the Parable of the Sower. Pastor says he thinks it’s less about what kind of soil we are— rocky,…

Now light fills the tree outside our window— tree whose fruit, when it comes, only the birds, and just a few of them, want to eat, tree that turns stiff and dry midsummer, rushing the season, so we fear the city will come and butcher it, though so far it’s been spared because in spring…

The talk was on God’s tabernacle, a diagram with the palm of his hand, fingers tucked into the holy place, when you threw an apple to me. I wondered until I saw the rough square cut. Inside the fruit, a note damp with seeds and juice, You are altogether beautiful, my darling. There is no…

I loved you before I was born. It doesn’t make sense, I know. I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see. And I’ve lived longing for your every look ever since. That longing entered time as this body. And the longing grew as this body waxed. And the longing grows as this body…