Articles

I am none the less
boundless this morning,

trawling, under your sway,
winter’s counterfeit cages

wracked & rife & caroled
by the catalogue of all

I do and must learn to love
beyond my power to stay.

A version of this essay was delivered at Boston University on November 1, 2007, at a lecture sponsored by the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts in memory and honor of Amos Niven Wilder. THE LANGUAGE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT has been with me since childhood. The words of Jesus, specifically, are so familiar…

THE PHERICHE CLINIC clings to a windswept, rocky plateau two day’s hike below Everest Base Camp. Dwarfed by the majestic Himalayan peaks that surround it, this collection of low stone buildings is the highest medical clinic in the world, offering climbers and those who live there the care and expert treatment that are essential in…

Tent Revival, 1957 When things get back to normal God will put on black robes and ascend to the mercy seat to judge the world, the ruined cities, the devastated hills, the living and the risen dead. When things get back to normal, He’ll open the Book of Life and read what each man has…

She is so beautiful, it is enough— her skin like milk, nipples like cherries, her hair a long night without stars. I find irresistible the blue vein pulsing above her left ankle, the green of those intelligent eyes. Everything she wants, I want, and though my mind is cleaved, my full heart can only rejoice.…

—Lord, take the stone of my heart and break it— When it comes to conversation, I like the idea of the wailing wall, scribbling a petition on a scrap of paper and slipping the paper scrap into a crack between sun-blistered stones, knowing our prayers may not be granted, but trusting the silence that answers.…

Amazing how the prayers come back, ———the cues to stand and kneel and sit, the hymns rising after so many years into the air of this small old church. ———We lean together in summer sunlight as the priest wafts past in an incense cloud and the small choir ———sings off-key in corner light. Yesterday you…

I’m thinking again of Pandora and the box, of the boy committed to stopping her until she undid her golden braids and got her way. He’d wanted to open it, too, but he’d made a promise to a friend, and for a while the promise was relevant. I’m thinking of irrelevance, of word and spirit…

After the snow stops and the sky opens cloudless over the mountains, and after three pairs of cardinals flutter back to our feeder, I stand by the kitchen window watching them as I did two years ago this week, talking to you on the phone, tube in your throat capped, strength, you said, coming back…

Huge hunks of the silver maple we’d just cut down killing the grass, trunk pieces split into quarters a good hundred pounds each, and my father’s start with the trouble in my head again as I loaded the biggest ones into the wheelbarrow, metal scrape and sawdust, tightrope balance to the woods’ edge, then back…