Active Sight: Vija Celmins and Jackson Pollock from Pictorialism to Perception
By Essay Issue 59
ON MAY 16 of this year, Night Sky #2 by Vija Celmins, on view at the 2008 Carnegie International at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, was vandalized by one of the museum’s own security guards, who used a key to cut a gouge down the painting’s middle, damaging it beyond repair. While this act was…
Read MoreA Man Gone to Time, A Woman Crucified
By Poetry Issue 59
Brother, at your grave, we stood gathered under Thanksgiving trees bare with wind. When the words had been said, I expected silence to resume. But your pale fiancée placed an incongruous stereo on your new earth, pressed the red button and the brief world opened to song. I stood amazed as music broke forward. Stunned,…
Read MoreThe Psalm of Your Face
By Poetry Issue 59
Lord, let your face be lined. Lord, let your hair be gray with patience. Holy Father, let your cheeks be silver with long growth as you put up with me and put up with me. Lord, let your face be a blazon of parts in which I can name you sufficient to be seen in…
Read MoreThe Psalm of Then
By Poetry Issue 59
Then, the Lord heard me in the wilderness of my soul. Then, the lost place of me became clear. Then, I recognized distraction for what it is. Then, I was freed from the desert of diversion. Then, I was moved to the green oasis within me. Then, the still voice of the Lord was as…
Read MorePsalm as Frustration I Can Live With
By Poetry Issue 59
I love the fierce wind outside my window but know I would freeze in it. I love the fierce wind from where I view it. I love to wake and feel the presence of the Lord within. I feel his presence only to lose it, lose his presence only to feel it return. I am…
Read MoreBorn, Again and Again
By Essay Issue 59
I GREW UP NEAR A SMALL RIVER in southwest Missouri, really a large creek, an easily navigable waterway with a calm current, deep in places, in others flowing with low white ruffles over rocky shoals. I went to this river often, as if to a favorite relative, to see what was happening, wading and swimming…
Read MoreThe Hours
By Poetry Issue 59
After Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Illuminated manuscript, 1410-1416 Like dancers in a pirouette the mowers with their scythes, their polished rhythms whispering through harvest’s green ballet. Two women turn the tumbled hay, so slight and stockingless and lithe one could wish the world this script, no hail of brightness perishing through…
Read MoreAn Icon from the Flood
By Poetry Issue 59
Sent from Troy, Alabama, September 1, 2005 All things fall, all things are built again…. ————(For Bill Thompson) How empty ring the petitions of the saved, Like wind notes in an afterthought of wind When the storm’s done, though the ravaged Nearby you, nearby your salvaged town, Troop like ragged pilgrims to some central dome…
Read MoreStuck in Crafts
By Short Story Issue 59
I EAT A BALONEY SANDWICH every day on my lunch break at Jo-Ann Fabrics. Yesterday, my father, who is close to enlightenment and who wanted to use my employee discount, came in looking for red fabric for a new prayer shawl. He saw mustard on the corner of my mouth and his eyes darkened, then…
Read MoreGiotto’s Ratio
By Essay Issue 59
The following remarks were given at Villa Agape in Florence, Italy, on the opening evening of Image’s Florence Seminar, September 14, 2008. IMAGE is a journal devoted exclusively to contemporary literature and art—to the present moment—but here we are in the cradle of the Renaissance. We have not come out of mere antiquarian curiosity,…
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