Articles

ART MAY BE CONCERNED with the creative manipulation of images, but words are always part of the picture. When we encounter a work of art, a load of labels and captions, categories and explanations always works to help or hinder our better understanding. Some are printed on the wall beside the work; others we carry inside…

Goldfish in the horse trough nibble at morning’s surface. They are not busy; they are breathing. The sparrow threading straw under the eaves lifts whips of time to his mate’s music. This is the opposite of business. Birds, even singing, can be the architects of our silence. Would you be healed by being? Then be…

The kingdom of my kitchen invites one snail to measure a carrot peel with the full length of her body. Of Christ and necessity this snail says nothing. The celery shines. By morning, my countertops, my floor will glisten with the star road of her meanderings. It measures a universe of dark and light in…

ON MY BROTHER DECLAN’S third day on life support—the morning he becomes newsworthy—strangers begin to leave messages on the home phone. A funeral director leaves his number. An alarm-system salesman warns of the characters who scour the Globe and the Herald for stories like Declan’s, for tragedies that strike families from well-off towns, leaving their…

—five—six—seven—eight, and one— The dancers drum onstage from the wings where they were before the downbeat, that prehistoric moment, bandaged and flinching, calloused, split, grinning—the tick-swish of soles on bare wood; their presence shifts how light leaps off the watch of the ex-nun’s date. Such sound bodies. Their backs, extraordinary overlaps of muscle bound to…

for William Christenberry Some people have told me that this subject is not the proper concern of an artist or of art. On the contrary, I hold the position that there are times when an artist must examine and reveal such strange and secret brutality. It’s my expression and I stand by it. ——————————W.C. I.…

THEY WILL ALL LEAVE, first my brother-in-law, who is frank about his tastes, and then the others, borne away on several tides of pretext—the bathroom, pots on the stove, the freshening of drinks—from which none return. Now it’s just me watching, lying belly down on the bed where I used to sleep with my wife.…

The sexton lives in a big stone house. After supper he unlocks his church for a fee. Our tour group pays to climb past organ and choirloft, into the belfry where the daring grip a sheep-skinned knot and pull the rope straight down into a scene from the novitiate when I was in love with…

by these and countless other dear / impediments, I stoop to find / my knees

We say flight of the imagination, but stand ankle-deep in silt. We say deep life of the mind, but seal the stone to keep the tomb untouched, O Stillness. Nearly all we find to say we speak for the most part unawares, what little bit we think to say unmoved, O Great Enormity Unmoved. Brief…