More on: poetry

One day, picking guavas with the girl, she lowered the branch and said to the air —unaware that she was teaching me— Guava is a blessed fruit. Her movement, her illuminated face agitated the dust and spirit in the air: The Kingdom is within us; God dwells in us. There is no escaping the hunger…

The theologians all err when they describe God in their treatises. You sharpen me until I could have made that irreparable cut. God will be born again to rescue me. Kill me, Jonathan, with your knife. Free me from the captivity of time. I want to understand your nails; the plan is not fixed, your…

In Nepal, five thousand are dead and the rest are afraid to return to the house of the next tremor. A continent away, Tom finds objects to hold to quiet the tremors in his hands. Men are pulled from buildings five days underneath them, still breathing. The easiest way to achieve rescue is to cry…

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…

The first principle: Do no harm. The second: The air calls us home. Third, we must fill the bowls of others before we drain our own wells dry. The fourth is the dark night; the fifth a subtle scent of smoke and pine. The sixth is awareness of our duties, the burnt offering of our…

Imagine yourself an old wolf: lean and ragged, belly shrunken beneath a ribcage as bowed as a galleon’s undercarriage, shoulders broader than your painful hips, and paws the size of a lion’s. You terrify each living thing you encounter, voles and rats ducking into holes, rabbits humping their soft backs, propelled under bushes by back…

Rebel, but you cannot refuse. The son of the father or son of man could be anyone. You win some, you lose. Rebel, but you cannot. Refuse to think or do, and still you choose. At the end of time, no one can rebel. For you cannot refuse the Son of the Father or Son…

A soft, slow smell rises up from the field, the smell of bread, of Mass, of Friday. After the rain, idleness climbs the agaves and the fennel stalks bend under the unbearable weight of their own perfume. Wounds are so tender that reality hides underground, as frightened and retractable as a snail. Translated from the…

This is a rich, mighty martyrdom.              —Santa Teresa de Ávila, The Book of Life You bind my hands with saliva, then turn three times round my waist and ensure your victory with a knot without a loophole. You’re a snail, binding the hands of the rain. You rend the night any which way…

Do you remember the seraphim in that Romanesque fresco we were looking at in the room of the Master of Pedret? They looked straight at us, hands outstretched, as if they refused to die under the effects of depigmentation that was erasing them from the kingdom of light. They’re symbols of love—Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna—peeling and…