The Wings
By Poetry Issue 114
On prayer, air travel, and finding place.
Read MoreThe House Where I Was Born
By Poetry Issue 109
Sometimes in the sound and the light / it grows so still / it’s possible to forget / you are moving through the air.
Read MoreCaravan
By Poetry Issue 103
I read of a man a thousand miles south who heard a large crowd passing by.
He laid down his shears on his father’s land and joined the northbound caravan.
The Kingdom of the Eternal Heaven
By Essay Issue 57
WE ARE ROCKETING through the steppes into the eye of the setting sun. To the east of us, the great thrusting shoulders of the Tian Shan, or “Celestial Mountains,” are burnished with the deep rose gold you see on icons from the Sinai or tanka paintings from Nepal. According to local lore, deep within the…
Read MoreNothing
By Poetry Issue 60
…no evil thing is evil insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is turned… —Saint Gregory Palamás What had I meant to say? Just now. I have forgotten. Which among the extant flourishing phenomena are you? Is that a limp? The evening drifts into its routine dimming of particulars, quite literally evening the scene…
Read MoreNo Path
By Poetry Issue 64
Kayak on the quarry: will you hug the shore, push straight across, waver or dawdle? No paths on the water. Almost November, and the poison ivy is still green. The soft trap of sky closes all around. An artful little spray of leaves near the shore, as though Martha Stewart were sitting in for God.…
Read MorePassage
By Poetry Issue 64
On the swift cruise there was only time and water, twin mothers of an anxious son. And money. In the long end of day we pushed right at the sun and failed again except at witness, the beauty softened by mist and latitude until we could almost bear it. What else could we do? We…
Read MoreLessons
By Poetry Issue 64
To cure the hard habit of anger, eat an orange so slowly the juice spills from your fingers and waters the wild gladioli that purple the stones on high Kastelli. To learn patience, go with Ritsa to the little stoa of a shop in Skala, where old Pandalis weighs the small bags of chickpeas and…
Read MoreThe Look of Love
By Poetry Issue 67
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…
Read MoreRecompense His Paraclete
By Poetry Issue 69
His paraclete was a piebald donkey bequeathed him by a kindly parish priest whose sins he supped away one Whitsunday some months in advance of your man’s demise. “Never a shortage of asses, Argyle. God knows we’ve all got one of them at least.” Which seemed the case on closer scrutiny. Argyle named the wee…
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