Articles

It is only the forgetting—of our debts, of our teachers and fellows, of our place in the larger story we are unwittingly writing—that is a sin, a crime against memory, against both past and posterity.

Once a week he holds me against him like a child and I inhale wood and horse and earth, sometimes  sweat (not sharp with the agony of hurry but warm,   like a tree trunk seeping sap on a sunny day); I keep  my eyes closed, as if afraid time will shift like a rocking boat beneath my feet, and that…

God the God of the cement silo, sunset-stained,
and the conveyor
                                         running through the night.

I was born out of terror,
             horn-caught and tangled,

                            pulled from the brush
with a cry of thorn and leaf.

Laughter is one way in which I experience God, and so I want to write about the ways in which I am sometimes lucky to experience the divine, as friend. A friend who makes you laugh out loud, and who makes you weep. I’m a weeper, and that too is a gift from God.

I used to keep my beliefs about hell tucked latent in the hidden place. After Joe died, they began to eat at their cupboard, like moths in a sweater drawer.

In Leonardo’s  
Annunciation, 
is there a dove?  
I certainly can’t 
find one—but  
Leonardo is famous 
for hiding things,