Articles

On the road before sunrise, so none of us were citing Homer, Keats, or Dickinson during the drive to catch my flight. Only after I’d asked did Sean and Jens mention the anaconda they had found once in Sean’s cattle pasture. From time to time someone spotted the height of egret whiteness crossing daybreak’s blaze…

—————–after a painting by John Henry Twachtman Like a gate to Paradise, illumined as how fluttering angels might appear, the meadow seems misty while at the same time impossibly bright. But there looks to be hardly any way into such purity of color, through the many layers of lavender and yellow. And yet a few…

——1 Samuel 3:1   1. these days it seems one can only know ——-what God is not & ——-not what God is fully as though fullness is printed ——-plainly in plain sight & written in the body these days it seems the price for the divine ——-is one we cannot pay ——-though we never could…

1. Triune God, inhabiting the deep of us, Reassembling the broken chaneys of the mind, The wide and empty spaces Our earth orbits in have their own solidity; And your laughter swells across The undulating bubbles of the void.   2. Master of the waves that hold the stars, The loops enfolding all there is,…

Yield is spring’s withered apple blossom ———evolving into fall’s rosy fruit. Yield is the dry grass under our feet ———softening in dew, and summer drought abated ———-by a week of steady rain. It’s the snowmelt stream shaping itself ———-to the rocks in its path. Yield is when, besieged by a poem, you ———are taken hostage…

A purple kite against the wall with the wind still in it. Above the side altars with the brass candelabras and unlit candles, purple ghosts. Purple ghosts behind the votive trays in the vestibule, too. Only the sacristans collecting for burning the excess palms are left uncovered, for now. Here stood the Little Flower; here,…

———————-Holy Thursday, adoration Headlights enter through the window like a mob ——-and, in a flash, pace the repurposed cafeteria. Jesus in the garden; Jesus in the Altar of Repose. Most of us resist ——flinching when in dim light someone misjudges a folding chair. All of us note the rain pulsing like a heartbeat. ——Then we…

i. Mid-morning Inside the rented van, a stone-gray moth head-butts the windshield, drops stunned in a looping catch, and rises to the same task, intent, not on light—there are other windows, some of them open—but this one light. Now it pauses in a midair hover, its hinged wings wide and minutely scripted in a flowing…

That woman carrying a stone might be understood like this: the Virgin and the Stone:—-to her has been foretold  ————————————the weight of the world. She carries a stone like others their cross.—-A–cross: said to be from this landscape’s newest tree:—artificial tree whose fruit is a natural corpse.—-The stone has the weight ——————————————–of a dead child:…

has walked barefoot over the waters and left a trace of toxic silver that now seeks to infiltrate the soft memory of mollusks and sea grass, of idle crabs at the waxing crescent, of these creatures made of water and prayer that we too are made of. Slowly, cautiously, we’ll be returning to the Renaissance…