Articles

SOME YEARS AGO Charlottesville, Virginia, was abuzz with the news that a wealthy Roman Catholic couple on an estate near town had built a private chapel for worship and had commissioned a painting of themselves in the presence of a resurrected Jesus Christ. My wife was amazed; what effrontery! I defended the couple, pointing out…

Hiking in Switzerland with a bad back and doctor’s orders not to fall, through meadows of bluebells and buttercups, daisies and tiny orchids of pale lavender, tiger-striped mossy rocks, forget-me-nots, even the thistles tender in their bristly buds. But danger lurks in beauty of the shining rock slippery with summer melt when here the trail…

The Eighth Day after Creation Then what a falling-off there was, unruly man, a violent God— when earth gave way, and rocks sprang up, volcanoes poured their fire down and mountains rose with jagged crags to form a world outside the plot. Though here today among the glaciered peaks pine stems still grow straight up…

OUTSIDE A FINE New Orleans restaurant in the early fifties, a married man asks an unattached woman, “Have you ever driven south of here?” and she says, “South of here, I didn’t know there was any south of here. Does it just go on and on?” Then, without agreeing upon their intentions, the two take off—for…

Figure and Landscape in the Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya   “Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth….” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. —Genesis…

for my father Having pictured the soul as a kind of private moon that hovered invisibly above a person’s shoulder, when my mother said a man and woman’s love for one another could bring their child’s soul down from heaven to be born, I saw it as a cloud-like orb slipping down from the vicinity…

An unexpected reflection of myself in a passing window glances this way then after a quick double-take recognizes me. Like me, she’s caught by surprise; no time for the split second preparations that tend to precede looking in a mirror, or to hide the disappointment in her eyes, her sense that had we met incognito…

Understand the light, then, and recognize it ————————–—Corpus Hermeticum ——————–Memory is a kind of accomplishment ————————William Carlos Williams I Birdsong on the book page, birdsong on the brown rug; fanfare of birdsong above the radio orchestra; birdsong in shafted light of the wooden blinds. In one moment I heard them—by which I mean they’d all…

Singer, songwriter, and Grammy-winning producer Joe Henry has been making records since 1986. He has released a dozen albums of his own songs, most recently Scar (2001), Tiny Voices (2005), Civilians (2007), Blood from Stars (2009), and Reverie (2011). Allmusic.com’s Thom Jurek writes that as a songwriter, Henry occupies “a space that only he and…