With My Body I Thee Worship
By Culture Issue 107
Glück’s novel was a particularly poignant book to read this spring, when I found myself abruptly unable to touch another person, go to Mass, or receive the Eucharist. Lent rolled on without any anticipation of a liberatory Easter; then it was Easter, and I was still alone.
Read MoreLove Poem, Ending
By Poetry Issue 103
There will be thousands of warm nights
like this one, millions of the beetles, this whole darkened face
of earth erupting in brief constellations.
Tom as a Series of Declaratives
By Poetry Issue 91
Religion is a gesture of overt metaphor. Literature mostly accidental metaphors the writer meant as gestures. Moments presupposed to be meaningful rarely are. Attention is the fourth wheel on a grocery cart, where the grocery cart is your mind and attention the one wheel not always touching, but it can swivel in its bearings and…
Read MorePlowboy’s Bible
By Poetry Issue 89
A poor printing, eye blight, a spine of straw, the threshed and winnowed word, heaven unhusked, a kind of seed unpacked, conspicuous fantail, fishy contraband, rendered law, thunder’s ragged hymnal, bottomless wineskin warped from deluge and drying with the hay, frozen, frostbit, thawed and sighing like the heart, prodigal returned, a glass- bottomed boat, God…
Read MoreAt Terezín
By Poetry Issue 54
The swallows dive near and twist Their invisible strings as if Binding you hand and foot, And tumble away, swallows like souls In paradise, whispering, “Here is one Who will increase our loves….” Every summer they came, they must have— Who could stop them?—to build Where they had built, looping The same knot theories and…
Read MoreA Metaphorical God
By Essay Issue 87
The following is adapted from the preface to The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery. My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art…
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