Articles

On her last visit to the hospice, my niece
watched a flock of red-winged blackbirds
settle in the tree outside the window,
as if waiting for my mother to join them.
My brother, the pastor, calls this a God wink.

My wife
Is reading D.H. Lawrence and says she wants to get a tattoo. She says that I’m not “deep,”
And maybe she’s right.

From the night woods, wild things come to possess
The fields they’ve lost to human violence
And savvy, as the dark itself returns to bless
The troubled mind with sleep.

Later, looking at his partially closed eyes, she suddenly remembered a creole word from the country where she had spent her childhood. Sodade. A mixture of nostalgia, tenderness, and yearning, a sense of the fragility of happiness.

Can the aesthetic life lead us to God?

Nothing terrible lurks outside our great and meady hall. The night is not / a warning. The flood is not a lesson.

the lord / has mocked / has envied and spied / has burlesqued and lined / with fine material / this moss

In no world was there enough medication, technology, or manpower to keep everyone alive.

Someday, in heaven, you insist / apologetically, we won’t have / these bodies