More on: saints

I believe in holy theft. Pelvis bone of Saint What’s-His-Name hoisted above famished fields for rain. Knuckle of the Mother for luck. Splinter of manger. Shards, their haloed ephemera. To hold a relic is to change it, under glass, with ropes, a ring of stones. Lord knows to protect love costs a tender violence. Head…

      Deus homo factus est       Natura mirante.   Is love the start of a journey back? If so, back where, & make it holy. Saint Cerulean Warbler, blue blur, heart on the lam, courses arterial branches, combing up & down, embolic, while inside I punch down & fold a floe of dough to make…

From the Janus view of the Janiculum,                      a warren of restricted views. To one’s left, the Vatican. Across the river, the Jewish Ghetto                      created by an edict of a pope, “Since it is absurd and utterly…

Black. Muscle. Stars. Wind. The horse was nearly torn in half. Black. Pulse. Strange. Light. The car’s right side was twisted open. Black. Crust. Oil. Shine. Imagine the night, the boy, the stallion, all of them closing in, loose for the first time in months. The car’s pointed hood, the horse’s neck, a low winter…

IN COLD WAR-ERA AMERICA, one of the more remarkable cultural developments was the efflorescence of visual arts programs in colleges and universities. This unprecedented expansion from 1945 to 1990 was launched even as most Americans remained indifferent, skeptical, or hostile to the rise of modern art. The upsurge in academic art programs attracted artistically inclined…

I RECALL A SUNDAY MORNING when the church lectionary readings included a passage from the prophet Isaiah. The lay reader that morning was a thoughtful, older man dressed in a tasteful gray suit. Standing at the lectern, he opened the Bible and read: At that time Yahweh had spoken through Isaiah son of Amoz. He…

Santa Rosalía de Mulegé Baja California 1820 THE COCHIMÍ SAY THE VIRGIN guards her pearls, and for that reason the church is never locked. The stone mission of Mulegé, perched upon red hills above the reach of estuarial floodwaters, had no doors to lock. The Indian workmen had not finished the carving. The church doorway…