More on: pilgrimage

Yusef is so taken with the woman in black that he stares at her as she makes her way to the back of the van, and he forgets himself, and Iordannis has to remind him to start the van. Yusef decides right then and there that he will have her picture.

Can we stay awake this time? Can we keep the world from ending, not by flood or fire but by its own human hand?

I’d just had a brush with the opioid epidemic—the Bible belt removed and fastened around the arm to isolate a vein.

IN HIS his masterful book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (reviewed in this issue), Paul Elie has crafted a braided narrative about the lives and works of four twentieth-century American Catholic writers, all of whom have become canonical figures: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. The first sentence of…

for E.J.K. I used to light candles for you (after your death had been catalogued in the secret book) in every cathedral I passed, most in small public squares. Cold stone, incense, the tall silence, the hush and seal of the door at the threshold. Though not a Catholic, I made the sign of the…

A chic Italian restaurant here on Rutherford’s Park Avenue. On the corner across the street: your home, sold to strangers. All those bright flowers you & Flossie tended to in your backyard gone. A piece of still-warm bread & a bottle of Chianti I had to bring myself. It’s a dry town still, where the…

after Fragonard When the first crocuses, the ones called golden crowns and the ones called midnights, push up through February’s mausoleum ground, I think of Fragonard, his patrons dead, the Terror over, the stays of his golden swing now cut. And I am tempted to lie down, even though the ground is cold, and listen…

You let your feet decide how to walk it, andante or andantino— only allow your breathing to become what wind is in the eucalyptus, now a susurrus, now a slow erasure of distractions. Cries from the soccer field and the street noise in Skala dissolve in the attention the stones require you give each footfall.…

—five—six—seven—eight, and one— The dancers drum onstage from the wings where they were before the downbeat, that prehistoric moment, bandaged and flinching, calloused, split, grinning—the tick-swish of soles on bare wood; their presence shifts how light leaps off the watch of the ex-nun’s date. Such sound bodies. Their backs, extraordinary overlaps of muscle bound to…

The sexton lives in a big stone house. After supper he unlocks his church for a fee. Our tour group pays to climb past organ and choirloft, into the belfry where the daring grip a sheep-skinned knot and pull the rope straight down into a scene from the novitiate when I was in love with…