Thomas Hardy in Oregon, Summer 2007
By Poetry Issue 61
Dawn sun glints off the dome of a golden statue I never saw in our garden before. Not squat, like my wife’s stone Buddha snug in its niche on the gazebo, but taut with a kind of waking energy, and life-sized for a man of my own height. A breeze tosses the lilac’s leaves until…
Read MoreFauré in Paris, 1924
By Poetry Issue 61
Nearing eighty, Fauré has found the end of sound. He never would have guessed it had so much to do with the Mediterranean light of childhood, or lake breezes swirling all summer at Savoy, and so little to do with music growing quieter everywhere but in his mind. He is relieved to hear the garbled…
Read MoreMaking It Strange
By Essay Issue 61
The following four short sermons were delivered at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, between July 28 and August 2, 2008. All Manner of Travesties: Genesis 4:1-17 The hazards of the creative act are the loam out of which true form emerges. There is no way of achieving true form without opening…
Read MoreDinka Bible
By Poetry Issue 61
One morning after the crucifixion, a Sudanese boy came to see his mother and father. He found his hut burnt to the ground. Two figures dressed in white asked him, “Boy why are you weeping?” “Because,” he replied, “they have taken away my family, and I do not know where they have laid them.” The…
Read MoreNight Vision: Jacques Maritain and the Meaning of Art
By Essay Issue 61
THE PEOPLE WE CALL artists have always gone into a dark space. A space turned inside-out. Not a somber space, where darkness is sadness, but a mysterious one—like the nighttime darkness of the imaginative child who marches golden caravans across his bedroom ceiling. The poet Homer, archetype of artists, was famously blind—yet out from his…
Read MoreA Conversation with Madeline DeFrees
By Interview Issue 61
Madeline DeFrees is the author of two chapbooks and eight full-length poetry collections, including Spectral Waves (Copper Canyon, 2006) and Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), winner of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Washington Book Award, as well as two books of nonfiction about convent life. She spent many years as a nun…
Read MoreArgument in Memoriam
By Poetry Issue 61
Take, for example, This sunflower stuck in a vase. Its huge dark center daily sheds a load of pollen Onto the fake wood veneer of my desk, as if my desk Were dirt; this room, a field; the window, a planet’s Rectangular sky. The myth of ongoingness. We must assent, we do, The clouds rumbling…
Read MoreTeach Us to Pray
By Poetry Issue 61
pace Thomas Merton When you pray, let your tongue taste the words it forms, and let your mind watch the meanings forming. This will paralyze your prayers, but it will stop your meaningless recitations. Next, as you pray to God, think about his omniscience, his power, his goodness and the problem of theodicy. This too…
Read MoreThe Dawning
By Poetry Issue 61
I look out from a convenience-store doorway, just off a mid-summer Indiana exit, to where he stretches halfway under our truck— body flush against the days of oil and dust washed and unwashed away. He scans the underside to find a leak that trickles from beneath the axle and metal sheltering our children who stir…
Read MoreWorking in Metal
By Poetry Issue 61
Bernheim Forest Today’s forest floor, a terrazzo of copper leaf. The remaining scrub also copper: copper breath, penny breath, too faint to call it rustling. The mother trees of summer— those iron lungs—streamed oxygen from paps that swayed sweet rock-a-byes in green blouses. But now all is brittle air. Underfoot snap and crack. And all…
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