More on: water

The waters of the Sonoran Desert are scarce and wily. In O’odham lands, shy rivers will retreat underground, seeping into the sand, as if to rest from the seen world for a while.

the body learns to move / like a painter / seeing the unseen.

Deacon Nkosi, a member of the church, told the newspaper,
“The pastor taught us about faith on Sunday last week.”

Sometimes, to comfort myself, I think of myself as a city, not a woman, but a city that can be rebuilt again.

This silence before
love pulls itself
apart, against
the current of its own
longing, is the most terrible
silence I know.

WHEN MY FATHER finished seminary at Vanderbilt, he served his first small church in Beech Bluff, Tennessee. He was single and drove a little moped. He took disco dancing lessons to stave off loneliness and survived on church ladies’ casseroles. That summer he was working as a counselor at a church summer camp when he…

There are panels of sky as good as forgotten, Evans’ gelatin folds of Florida circa 1934. The line of sky is dark at first where the gulf hits it, then comes to me like a halo around the palm tree with its neck bent, its spray of branches leaning out of frame as if to…

Argyle shat himself and, truth be told, but for the mess of it, the purging was no bad thing for the body corporal. Would that the soul were so thoroughly cleansed, by squatting and grunting supplications. Would that purgatories and damnations could be so quickly doused and recompensed, null and voided in the name of…

for Robin Needham, killed in the 2004 Christmas tsunami Something shuddered in the un- fathomable dark, and a wave shouldered forth like an eighteen wheeler skidding sideways into oncoming traffic—a wave, beautiful as snow on a navy sleeve inhering by the power of a word, the word that shuddered in each dark cell of the…

Sudden summer rain, warm on your back _____like asperges slashes, more of a blessing than anything to get dolloped in the eye and laugh away _____the shame of believing in any kind of redemptive wash to get to the glass door before the stroup of sky _____spills, to be the chaplain carrying in the far…