Issue 113

She now wanders at large to the notorious peril to her soul.

Many have lamented that we don’t have a Lewis to help us think through these questions (or a Chesterton or a Tolkien to help him), but in my estimation Sally Rooney comes pretty close.

The ancients,” she says, “thought rivers began in heaven.” / Don’t they? But I’m too amazed to listen. / “We have the same words,” I say. “In our ancient Bible / all the rivers run to the sea. But ours return.

Preacher-lady donned her slender catch of cloth / & ushered folk in. She said a few words, had us linger / with loneliness awhile.

Architects in the Bay Area talk about concepts and ideas. I talk about poetry. I look at a design project and ask, how can I make something emotionally meaningful?

to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible / Odilon Redon writes of painting a vase of flowers”

Most of the artworks erased the human presence, or if it appears, it is only a fragment. There is a deep sense of absence and loneliness.… Although the figure is absent, there is still a living breath or a hand offering the possibility of healing.

Caesar, highest, / seated where Caesar sits, the granite drape / of his vermilion cape, and there beneath it / Caesar’s bare breast

In the myth, Adam, the man, labors above / warm red earth, voracious earth that takes / the life it gives into itself, as soon replenishes… / What have we done, or what through us was done?