More on: scene

after Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory It is not quite peace, this breathing rain, for peace requires human company. I have only tattered cuffs and wisps of thread in my pocket for each soul I could not save. I first mistook the whitewashed brick for barracks, but now, while the rain heaves in…

You must desire Nothing. —————Saint John of the Cross Light glows off the drifts like a child’s long gaze upwards. Only the sky is heavy, a drum full of laundry—white, reluctantly tumbling. I don’t need to look out the window to know how the corners of houses give themselves away, like people who’d do anything…

They sound freshly wounded, weeping their few cracked notes. Lullaby to the fly in the web, the torn gazelle, the Ice Man with grass in his shoes fighting sleep on the glacier. Listen, they chorus. Here is the underlying sorrow of the world. In the belly. In the rock. In the black holes of heaven…

1 The cloak of the saint was filled with roses The cloak of the saint rose above the city The cloak of the saint was thrown over the back of a chair it slowly filled with a human form it was filled with the sound of wind It floated down the mountainside sheep it passed…

I look out from a convenience-store doorway, just off a mid-summer Indiana exit, to where he stretches halfway under our truck— body flush against the days of oil and dust washed and unwashed away. He scans the underside to find a leak that trickles from beneath the axle and metal sheltering our children who stir…

Bernheim Forest Today’s forest floor, a terrazzo of copper leaf. The remaining scrub also copper: copper breath, penny breath, too faint to call it rustling. The mother trees of summer— those iron lungs—streamed oxygen from paps that swayed sweet rock-a-byes in green blouses. But now all is brittle air. Underfoot snap and crack. And all…

Where the Lord lives in heaven, is he lonely? Does our Father walk his marble floors without the company of anyone righteous? Who alone is venerable enough to keep the Lord company? My voice is small, yet I call to your house, Lord. Does the wind enter your chambers and rooms, cold and empty? Where…

Mornings their garden greens and flowers, tomatoes ripen fat as babies’ bellies, hollyhocks tower straight-laced as fence rails. This is not the black-topped yard of her childhood, weedless, grassless, without tree bark or squirrel. Here she follows behind her husband’s wild planting. Where Adam has sown, she is Eve weeding, creating order and the simplicity…

The death of one god is the death of all. —Wallace Stevens When you left it was as if a glacier retreated, As if the ice tonnage, which rasped, scraped, and scoured for ages, Diminished in a moon’s single phase to a trickle of meltwater. I live in the aftermath—till, eskers, erratics, cirques, exposed bedrock.…

For Armand and Ros de Mestral 1 Like many great cities Montreal is on a river. But the Saint Lawrence is not what divides it. We stay in the heights. I don’t have to leave the garret atop this three-story house on Thornhill in order to transcend. The view contains immensity, sun easy on the…