More on: searching

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.…

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography by Richard Rodriguez (Viking, 2013) White Girls by Hilton Als (McSweeney’s, 2013) Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, 2013) THE DUSK OF A SUMMER EVENING in London’s Hyde Park, years ago. Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, is misidentified by a woman he’s passing on the street. She smiles. “Arabie?” The author…

The sun turning to sackcloth means nothing to see here; all the sheeted corpses look the same. The moon surging with blood equals the deaths your butterfly wings effected while you slept. And the stars sizzling at your feet like Epsom salts are his way of saying you’ve lost your chances with time and space.…

You say you will never forsake us then send a horse the color of decaying flesh to wipe out a fourth of the earth. God does not will woe, the pastor says. Disaster unfolds from our own misdeeds. We sing, lift hands. The drummer kicks out mercy and grace. But I still see the horse…

You were born a swath of frost in the clover, nudged up on icicle legs. Now you cut through men like a derecho, sulfur and Sodom in your nostrils, entrails winding your hooves. I am trying to believe that God doesn’t will destruction, that out of love he allows our terrible freedoms to gallop across…

THE SPELLS CAME late that summer and left him bewildered, muttering. He had known this was coming, had felt the tremors in his mind and seen familiar objects—his can of shoe polish and his TV remote—transformed in his hand into strange artifacts. The TV remote he found in his desk, facedown beside the calculator. The…

What became of the nice pagan girl I married? you complained one morning after I’d found my way to the church down the street and kept walking back every Sabbath. Over dinner you’d quiz me on the sermon, argue with the absent preacher, and me if I defended his BS. Maybe you resented any other…

A silver thread pierces my hand, Gleams in lamplight, my fingers flexing there, The needle plunging into bleeding skin, Making a high-pitched, silver sound Becoming words shining in the flame that they create. Tarnished words converge into beginnings, Flame and words, beginnings In moonlight, fairy rings, clouds across the sky Entering a sentence that began…

Word lived in solitude. Walked the dog before dawn. Coffee on the patio. The air was thin. There were no stars. Silence drifted from the river with the mist. Word wandered through the house, looked out the window. Could the darkness speak, what would it say? What would Word answer? Word took a deep breath,…