Articles

Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful the Beloved (both from Copper Canyon). Long known for his condensed and crafted style, in his recent work, Orr demonstrates a shift toward the personal lyric at its most stripped-down,…

Knowing life grinds us, And dust Is what we’ll become. Sensing, likewise, That the moral Of our story Has to do With being mortal. Yet love grounds us. And the beloved Grows in us: We are her slow cocoon. And the poem is a door; The song, a little window. § Bowed by a ceaseless…

DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…

AFTER A LONG CITY bus ride traversing the outskirts of Rome, including a few transfers and a bit of walking, I arrived just in time to hear the churchyard gate clang shut. This was no simple clicking of a latch, but a resounding, ringing crash—not the kind of sound that left any doubt as to whether…

MRS. WALLER WAS seventy-one years old and she kept her invalid husband in cigarettes and beer by posing for the figure-drawing class at the academy. Her first name was Inez, but neither the instructor nor the students ever called her anything but Mrs. Waller. Darrell Horn, honorably discharged from Uncle Sam’s navy, had no idea…

i In the eyes of Dürer’s Saint Jerome, desert inhabits the dark flecks of his downward gaze. It harrowed him. He came back clean as picked bone. Chalcis of sunlight, and sand— only in the eyes can days be counted, days of muscle wasting, in which desire dwindled to the body’s dry growl. He’s written…

Stirring among the pines. The sapling’s leaves like oval wings tremble. Between the whoofs of startled deer, echoing, an echoing clear creed of some unvanquished mystery— night-rising crows humbling their caws below the oaky whoo of the boreal owl. Below that, what? Threads of wood, a bed of pine, the needles strewn in love beside…

After love discovers it, the little burn or birthmark in some odd spot he can neither see nor reach; after the internist’s downturned mouth, specialists leaning over him like diviners, machines reading his billion cells; after the onslaught of insight, cures crawling through him like infestations, so many surgeries a wrong move leaves him leaking…

The light falling on the steps of city hall this late afternoon infuses the whole sky and bathes these poor little trees of heaven stuck in concrete. Flooding down from all sides, light slants across ruddy storefront brick, streaks along cables, glitters up from the bay, and now, as I turn west toward the hospital,…

I was stopped on the sidewalk by pears glowing on their tree like antique ornaments with flaking paint, a green metallic shimmer, hinting at yellow, mottled with a few flecks of red. As light flickered over them, they seemed to flutter like candles in the leaves. But no—they were pears, and probably hard, I told…