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———————————————–it marked the edge of a circle, split into the raked sky a seam I thought I saw, and given the right atmosphere, would travel through. Do I believe? The sky was widened slightly, as it widens at the tip of threatened churches, and the spire rises higher so the deity is nearer, so can…

Portraits of the Sonata: Desire and Transformation in Modern European Cinema   IN 1984, A MIDDLE-AGED MAN wearing headphones, sequestered away in the attic of an East German apartment building, sits before a typewriter. Around him are the trappings of his profession, the machines and gear that allow him to spy upon events transpiring in…

SHE’D BEEN Flying a Cessna, shooting practice take-offs and landings with a flight instructor at an Omaha airstrip that was just a windsock and one lane of unnumbered concrete runway veined with tar repairs. Richard Nixon was president, the month was September, the temperature was sixty degrees, and she was Karen Manion, mother of two.…

They sound freshly wounded, weeping their few cracked notes. Lullaby to the fly in the web, the torn gazelle, the Ice Man with grass in his shoes fighting sleep on the glacier. Listen, they chorus. Here is the underlying sorrow of the world. In the belly. In the rock. In the black holes of heaven…

Past sundown you bring me here, my first time inside a mosque. Men sitting cross-legged on the floor beside their teacher briefly look up at us, then turn back, on fire to hear the word. You ramble on in praise of Muslim art, exquisite painted tiles, floral carvings in teak, your speech articulate as a…

Dawn sun glints off the dome of a golden statue I never saw in our garden before. Not squat, like my wife’s stone Buddha snug in its niche on the gazebo, but taut with a kind of waking energy, and life-sized for a man of my own height. A breeze tosses the lilac’s leaves until…

Nearing eighty, Fauré has found the end of sound. He never would have guessed it had so much to do with the Mediterranean light of childhood, or lake breezes swirling all summer at Savoy, and so little to do with music growing quieter everywhere but in his mind. He is relieved to hear the garbled…

The following four short sermons were delivered at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, between July 28 and August 2, 2008.   All Manner of Travesties: Genesis 4:1-17 The hazards of the creative act are the loam out of which true form emerges. There is no way of achieving true form without opening…

One morning after the crucifixion, a Sudanese boy came to see his mother and father. He found his hut burnt to the ground. Two figures dressed in white asked him, “Boy why are you weeping?” “Because,” he replied, “they have taken away my family, and I do not know where they have laid them.” The…