Articles

Someone always climbs a tree When a saint arrives—half- Way marker of earth and sky: You can’t get there from here. But this is how we represent Desire for liberation, human form As flag announcing spirit through Flesh. That boy reaches for a bird or palm, The top part of the tree where branches break…

Under the catastrophic dark, the comet splintering the sky with its ancient grief, under the splay-handed palms, under drinks glowering dark in globes of glass, under the tender humidity, the phosphorescent surf, under the calls of nightjars chuckling up from the ground, under the ticking aloe under the moon’s absence, under, under, under. Under the…

I I am looking for the letter that arrived after Uncle Sol’s death. The one that says: The war is over! Love to Kayla, X-O-X. I even searched back through the cardboard box, opening each envelope in precise reverse order— sorry for the lapse between this missive and the last— watching their lives drawing closer…

THE STOCK YOUNG MAN from the north, whose German mother had given him his blond curls and his Milanese father his brown eyes, was at twenty-six the youngest professor of zoology at the University of Pisa. He was driving today to a destination none of his departmental colleagues would have been caught dead at, midweek…

I I watch them enter, lined up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher, counting, passes, one pushes and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in 1942, I tell the behaved ones, orderly and under orders, and I’m just about to start that terrible…

ON MAY 16 of this year, Night Sky #2 by Vija Celmins, on view at the 2008 Carnegie International at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, was vandalized by one of the museum’s own security guards, who used a key to cut a gouge down the painting’s middle, damaging it beyond repair. While this act was…

I watched him fall and rise upon that hill, heard his call as he released his ghost. I never dreamed civility would damn me. I was like others, a man of honor with a wife who wanted peace of mind by nightfall, children who needed discipline, routine. I could not be a revolutionary, abandon what…

The light said stand, the cave said sleep. The cave said look, here are the eyes that mocked you, the hands that cast you out, said sleep, your sisters need their grief. The light said rise, step out of your sorrows, let them follow only if you choose. The light said choose. Because the light…

for E.J.K. I used to light candles for you (after your death had been catalogued in the secret book) in every cathedral I passed, most in small public squares. Cold stone, incense, the tall silence, the hush and seal of the door at the threshold. Though not a Catholic, I made the sign of the…

after Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory It is not quite peace, this breathing rain, for peace requires human company. I have only tattered cuffs and wisps of thread in my pocket for each soul I could not save. I first mistook the whitewashed brick for barracks, but now, while the rain heaves in…