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WHEN SOMEBODY DIES, I WATCH MOVIES. The day my grandmother passed, I sat at the altar with the brothers in The Darjeeling Limited. Watching Adrien Brody embody the sense of utter emptiness left by his character’s father’s death somehow helped get me a little closer to my own experience, though I couldn’t articulate it to anyone…

The toddlers maintain / zucchini, sing the songs / only they and those closer to the earth // Understand.

Midwestern reticence is respect for the unspeakable, the unknowable. What we do and what is done, to each other, to ourselves. What do you say to the flood, the tower, the burning bush?

I don’t consume saliva, I consume You

Have you seen God yet / how he’s rushing to arrive on time by two thirty / responsibility responsibility

I’ll take nails, / long nails, / and drive them into my body.

Olivia was about as high-Wasp as anyone I’d ever met, with her undergraduate degree from Smith and, before that, her four years at an all-girl’s boarding school in Pennsylvania, where she claimed she’d learned a song called “We Are Anglicans.” She loved to regale us with it when she came over for Shabbat.

Yesterday I spoke to a man from Dussen who’d had a very hard life. / For much of his story, he was a secondary character.