More on: prayer

I’d like to scale the cord in the vibrating dark, to find the source of all sound, to translate the frequencies. The way, as a child, I could hang onto a knot of rope and kick myself back from a wall into the arc and blur of summer air—that’s the prayer I want. To open…

Nevertheless, the rain continued. In dark doorways and under loading docks men slept with cardboard and cold. I said, “My heart is full with praising your justice.” Still, the sniper drew in a long terrible breath—or so I understand. I said I was lonely for my old body and my body became older still. I…

Stirring among the pines. The sapling’s leaves like oval wings tremble. Between the whoofs of startled deer, echoing, an echoing clear creed of some unvanquished mystery— night-rising crows humbling their caws below the oaky whoo of the boreal owl. Below that, what? Threads of wood, a bed of pine, the needles strewn in love beside…

The light falling on the steps of city hall this late afternoon infuses the whole sky and bathes these poor little trees of heaven stuck in concrete. Flooding down from all sides, light slants across ruddy storefront brick, streaks along cables, glitters up from the bay, and now, as I turn west toward the hospital,…

When I board the Manhattan-bound A train in Brooklyn, it is already crowded with commuters on their way home, faces bearing traces of the day—the downward lines of weariness, mostly, the sour pinch of frustration, sometimes the surprise of a smile or the clear signs of content: cheeks at peace, eyes that gaze with interest…

Outside, the traffic stutters, some drivers blow their horns and the impulse bolts in dendrite-leaps from car to car. I’d like to think it’s the bellow of my stiff-necked Hebrews, shofars raised to lips, razing, man to man, the walls of Jericho to its stony knees. But it’s more how a monkey lopes— branch to…

Proverbs master the man. He longs to be simple who writes a proverb. A proverb well chosen for a tombstone is a life. He who does not understand a proverb is the hole in a wire hanger. The weakest proverb is great, though a great proverb is never weak. There is no weak proverb. A…

ON MY BROTHER DECLAN’S third day on life support—the morning he becomes newsworthy—strangers begin to leave messages on the home phone. A funeral director leaves his number. An alarm-system salesman warns of the characters who scour the Globe and the Herald for stories like Declan’s, for tragedies that strike families from well-off towns, leaving their…

by these and countless other dear / impediments, I stoop to find / my knees

The breakfast was adequate, the fast itself sub-par. We gluttons, having modified our habits only somewhat within the looming Lenten dark, failed quite to shake our thick despair, an air that clamped the heart, made moot the prayer. Wipe your chin. I’m dying here in Omaha, amid the flat, surrounded by the beefy, land-locked generations,…