More on: Melissa Range

I want a little mystery. I don’t want to hear the obvious stated, even if I agree. I want to be awed.

Most days the labyrinth’s covered up with folding chairs, but Fridays it’s open even to unbelievers. Our docent says the labyrinth is not a maze, that the pilgrim cannot lose her way coiling toward the center rose. My pastor friend and I are chaperones, here to help field-tripping kids weave the ancient circuit that the…

Called crimson, called vermilion—“little worm” in both the Persian and the Latin, red eggs for the carmine dye, the insect’s brood crushed stillborn from her dried body, aswarm in a bath of oak ash lye and alum to form the pigment the Germans called Saint John’s blood— the saint who picked brittle locusts for food,…

Not green as new weeds or crushed juniper, but a toxic and unearthly green, meet for inking angel wings, made from copper sheets treated with vapors of wine or vinegar, left to oxidize for the calligrapher. When it’s done, he’ll cover calfskin with a fleet of knotted beasts in caustic green that eats the page…

The monk stipples the page with convoluted trails of lead toasted rust red, brick red, the color first used for rubric and for miniature. Three thousand tiny dots prick the initials, as if the text itself were pierced with nails, red edging each green, black, or yellow letter to embolden the story of Christ’s dolor…

King’s yellow for the king’s hair and halo, mixed if the monastery can’t afford the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord, to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro, in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard not gold but arsenic and sulfur. The Word…

Blessed Are Those Who Yearn New Poetry in Review The Glacier’s Wake by Katy Didden (Pleiades Press, 2013) God Loves You by Kathryn Maris (Seren Books UK, 2013) Incarnadine by Mary Szybist (Graywolf Press, 2013)   AT THE END of Paradiso, Dante, after confessing his inability to describe the vision of Love he sees, nonetheless…