More on: poetry

Gauzed shine on the infinite, the moondog blooms like a distant searchlight left of the moon, almost unmoving to the naked eye, as if tracking a slow-drifting object, like one of the balloons wafting into North Korea, balloons with winter socks tied to them, or one of Chagall’s ethereal blue bodies above a nameless Russian…

Then the river I hadn’t found held the rivers I had ransom. I knew I wouldn’t find it. I would leave where I wanted to stay. I was convinced we pay no other price. Then the river I hadn’t found held everything I had. The way belief holds proof so we forget. I could hear…

Once in the desert he said he saw the shape of a man, a body, the line around it neither light nor dark standing speechless in his path. That he could feel his shirt draw back against his body his mind was already giving back to fear until the figure turned to yield and let…

A chain of blue-white chips mimics waves pleating around Christ’s body. On the western wall, another scene of owl-eyed saints drawing light unlike us. Despite centuries of votive smoke, the shining ranks of prophets gesture, elegant as sommeliers, toward mosaic scrolls and would have you consider the honeycombed geometry of paradise—dome, arch, and column— it’s…

Cured to permanent gown, a mineral seep—all tears, all weep. The lick I am. The lips I’ll crimp in the swap of elements—the more of them, the more I melt. My backdrop old smoke in the shape of tents, my city most flagrant in absence— gutted cavity under the stilted SOS of stars. I have…

What offers a skeletal peep. Feather-smear, mostly gullet—agape for the secondhand upchuck grub, bolus crammed iridescent with carapace and wing. A holiness, this helplessness, the mother’s tireless, kenotic reconnaissance ending every time with her head bent to her nest of tidbit beggars, X-ray translucent, the tinder of their bones radiant beneath. All hollow. The aerate…

In my mouth the name of God an overripe pear: a grain, a grit on the tongue. A grail, all vowel-shaped gaps, like lipping the rim of an empty cup, that low-frequency opening undoing, unhinging the jaw. God’s name as eyetooth, meat-intended, a visible skeletal hint. God as salve for chalk. For the bent heart,…

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…

Christian Wiman, former editor of Poetry and current faculty member at the Yale Divinity School, has four poems in Image issue 81. We asked him to talk about what went into the writing of them.   Image: You’ve been interviewed a great deal lately about some rather large topics: illness, death, faith, doubt, and beyond.…

When Adam saw her, muscle of a new day, when he squatted to smell the musk between her legs, when he leaned down To grasp the wrist of the most familiar creature he’d encountered yet, to pull himself, the mirror image of himself, to her feet; When he took a few steps back to appraise…