More on: memory

What we built to hold us, the year’s memory, menus and daytrips, after a while came loose. Those nights we balanced on each other’s mistakes, cradling our wine: twigs those branches now. Who knew what lived there? She she she called one bird. What lived there knew its place. Another bird splits its nest wide,…

What is this world but the absence of God, his withdrawal, his distance (which we call space), his waiting (which we call time), his footprint (which we call beauty)? God could only create the world by withdrawing from it (otherwise there would be nothing but God), or by remaining in the form of absence, hiddenness,…

Night shift on Rine #4 with three thousand feet of drill pipe churning Oklahoma rock, the mud pump’s wheeze and suck, hammer of warped deck plates beneath my boots as I gaze from the rig’s north end upon treeless, dust-bowl no man’s land. The moon slithers under clouds that go all sullen and spread a…

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…

Fifty years ago, in Catholic school, a nun gave my mother a ribbon said to have been touched by a saint. This was when her brother was still alive, and masses were still read in Latin, and people still wandered across the street to other people’s houses in the evening. Now the school is coming…

The wires between house and garage could slice you as you fall, ladder a useless set of rungs; the mailbox could impale you, so I implore: no roof chores. When it’s gutter time, I stand beneath the ladder, uncertain anchor. My father, blond child, held his position as ladder-bracer, even when my grandfather threw chunks…

MY SUMMER WITH SYLVIA was like sighting deer in the woods. You hold your breath, try hard not to spoil it. Suddenly you have nowhere to be, nothing to do. You’re a kid again. It’s hide-and-seek—you’re hiding. Later, if somebody asks how your walk was, what can you say? “I saw a deer,” you say.…

Three or four of them congregated outside the sanctuary of the First Baptist   Church in McKenzie, Tennessee, savoring the last cigarette before service, voices low and knowing, a slight rasp-edge to their laughter. Cigarettes would kill you— I was ten years old and could read what it said right on the pack—but ignoring warnings…

Dismayed by the murder of Pakistani healthcare workers for vaccinating children against polio, I recall the dread that darkened my childhood before Salk proved the power of killed virus to halt infantile paralysis, the summer scourge. I also recall a girl, held upright by braces the rest of her life, one of six to fall…

MY DEAREST KATIE, Do you remember that evening we flew together from Burlington in Vermont to Saint Paul in Minnesota? Do you remember how the wind came in off Lake Champlain and cut through the streets of Burlington like a sawblade, the snow blistering somewhere out over the lake? We flew just ahead of the…