More on: relationships

So many things to see in this old world But all I can see is you. —“Together Alone,” 1970 The following is excerpted from Bruce Cockburn’s memoir, Rumours of Glory, forthcoming this November from HarperOne.   IN LATE 1966 I WAS INTRODUCED to two people, in very different circumstances, who would have a profound effect…

Your name, Jesus, is childhood in the body, at times a single malt upon the tongue, Vivaldi to the ears; your name, Christ, forgiveness to the heart, acceptance to the flesh, a troubled joy across the soul; at ever my very best I will plead to you, closest to me, for kindness. Perhaps the silence…

Down the block, our new neighbors, not unlike the old, could be named the Grackles, given the way everything they have is loud: cars, children, stereos, parties. It all spills out into the street—broken bikes, pizza boxes, a nasty looking dog with nothing to restrain it but the owner’s curse. Giving the mutt wide berth,…

I have love And a child, A banjo And shadows. It was the light, always the light. First, that absent early hour when he woke to find the world made strange, knocked awry, as if creation had suddenly undone itself, the landscape dishonored by this loss. The dawn moved haltingly toward day. He would have…

the sea saying, This is how you pray to your rock of a god, your massive cliff of a god, sheer drop into the bay, immovable, not-going-anywhere kind of god. Look at photos from a hundred years ago. Your god’s not moved. Glacial remains of a god. Impenetrable. Can’t-wear-it- down god. Rock face of a…

You, who seek grace from a distracted God, you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it, you, good son of a race of shadows— your great fortune is to have a job, never ate government cheese, federal peanut butter— you, jerked…

The greatest evil is when you forget that you are the son of a king. —Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidism   Yet, aren’t I the son of Joe Terman, used car salesman? And wasn’t he the son of Abraham Terman, carpenter, until injured by a salami truck, or was it a cable car, on Cedar…

1. AUNT MORAVIA SAID that she had swallowed a glass piano. She was my father’s aunt, a stitch of an old woman. She’d come to live with us when I was seven and my brother Robbie fifteen. Mother had been bedfast for a month before the birth of my sister. In the meantime Aunt Moravia saw to…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014.   IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it…

Your eyes are a brocade of finches, feathered bronze and gold-flecked shards of stained glass, afloat in pails of morning’s milk. Your pupils are black as onyx, as distant stars moments beyond collapse. I enter through them to find, in a barn lit through rafters, the Son of Man with mud dripping from his hands.…