Issue 96

For they considered not the miracle of the loaves: for their heart was hardened.                             —Mark 6:52 I understand now how the disciples could touch thousands of pieces of bread with their hands and still not get it, how so many salt fish could shimmer only in the periphery of their consciousness. Life schleps on.…

Icon of the Trinity, Andrei Rublev, Tretyakov Gallery We had gone to Moscow on a journey from the suburbs of Dublin and scattered townlands of West Cork, flying eastward into darkness, a night of prehistoric stars, millennia of Christianity evolved in our names: Joseph, John, and James. And then we came, at last, to stand…

in memory of Agha Shahid Ali 1. The wind perused the street and the debris, then thumbed through leaves that scraped the air. Nothing was in order or in bloom, but you stood on the sidewalk, streaked by noon’s light, making a shield from your sheaf of poems. You wanted even the trash the wind…

He shaped them out of balsa wood, one model plane after another, a boy during Word War II. With sharp blade in his small hand he carved the curves for what could hover over his bed at night, until a whole fleet of planes hung from the ceiling, breezes through the window rustling them into…

The whole city floats beneath our feet. Arched bridges hold it together, we say, lulled into dreams and into each other’s arms, window open to soft lapping. And at dawn a dove coos, two eggs loose on the bare windowsill. We arrived by air in Rome, then the train on rails over wooden posts driven…

When an Iranian Jew tells me that, in the nineties, the man who censored films for the regime was blind— that his assistant, a teenage boy, had to describe to his master every frame that might make imperfect their revolution—I think, of course. What better metaphor could there be to explain such foolishness? How else…

Sleepless, the fish wait ——-for the steer’s head, —————a ceremony they have learned to require—primordial ——-as the filaments of gills —————but honed in this economy of flesh: the apprentice’s arcing ——-heave, the silvery shattering —————of the surface, then, slowly, their prize’s descent. By the time ——-it reaches them, its mute bewilderment —————has relaxed into nothingness,…

The Lord is good to all; and his tender mercies are over all his works.                                               —Psalm 145:9 IN THE AUTUMN OF 1854, in the village of Grezhiv, in what was then known…

is holy, molten in its calcium cup, sun and moon mixed, hot in its prison, cells’ incentive to fuse firing, no second to loiter, calling now to a predator’s jaw. How the genetic vow is kept. Jellied not-yet, hard as thought becoming belief, little o in hope or love, un- umbilical one, cast into air,…

In creased coat, body beggar-curled, colored not the sky blue of Christ’s robe on the mount, nor his mother’s in the manger before she was haloed forever, but a bruising blue, indigo as blood trapped beneath flesh. What the drowned last see, sunk past light’s reach.