Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Scott Cairns
By Interview Issue 68
The current issue of Image features three new poems by Scott Cairns. The author of numerous volumes of poetry, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime contributor to Image, Scott has often advocated what he calls a “sacramental poetics”—the idea that a poem should not so much describe something as dosomething. Image: Your poems use an exacting, prophetic voice, but…
Read MoreOf the Body Taken In
By Poetry Issue 68
Now the lone swan dips groundward and her wings beat more slowly, the scrape of oak limbs wicking the air beneath her breast, the arms of oaks open and out, a narrow hall between their reaching (this the route through which the trees’ separateness wavers and grows tense). She is a clutter of feather, vision,…
Read MoreSunrise Insomnia Service
By Poetry Issue 68
Gethsemane’s sleepers, be with me If I sleep. Hypnopomps to the cock’s crow, To the olive grove’s Dawnshadows’ undergnarl. Skull-place, tricrossed, two-thieved hill, Over- Hang me if I wake. † The bed-world Is the total part, Unrememberable mnemonics Muttered through the dream (Now I lay me, Tarry here awhile— Now I lay me Down—tarry…
Read MoreWine for Those Who Faint
By Essay Issue 68
I DECIDED that if I was going to read the Hebrew Bible, I was going to read the whole thing. Every word of it. No skipping over or skimming the genealogies, the instructions for building the temple, or the details of animal sacrifice. I bopped through the intricate plots of Genesis and Exodus, my rule…
Read MoreConversion
By Essay Issue 68
MY FIRST CONVERSION took place when I was five years old on a heaven-reaching swing in my cousin’s back yard. It was a bright summer day and we had just returned from vacation Bible school at the Baptist church. Red cherry Kool-Aid stained our lips. Kristy was giving me an underdog—and I was swinging high enough…
Read MoreThis Orange That
By Poetry Issue 68
Santa Cruz Island A white cotton shirt like my wife’s Loose over her Shoulders I’m thinking just Brushing Her breasts But Provençal or Basque this Woman or Italian perhaps Not blonde not Dutch but her skin like Skin like the peel Of skin next the bulb of a tulip The scent Of her the scent…
Read MoreAt Chinese Harbor
By Poetry Issue 68
Santa Cruz Island First water and salt scud tailing twenty yards off A receding tide. Or stones first, the tide’s Measure and break. Or the word seal, for instance, This dead one’s skin slicker brined hard And cracked. Cell. Follicle. Division And increase. Wind first. Or absence. First, We’re not sure. Then upright walking. Another…
Read MoreStole
By Poetry Issue 68
In the moment my father died, we did not want to spend Another dollar for the twenty-four hours He would no longer be living In the Willow Haven full-care facility. We lobbied the nurses to credit the last moment He breathed among us. It was four-thirty am, April 26, 2007. Who in their right mind…
Read MoreBlood Blessing
By Poetry Issue 68
Forty times a day the journey of a lifetime Was the forty feet to the john Then falling into your chaise lounge, Spent sprinter, deep sea diver. Your oxygen line trailed after the weekends I drove down to sit a day or two: In the helmet of each breath, In your eighty-year-old bubble, We swung…
Read MoreInherited but Never Inhabited
By Essay Issue 68
Inherited but Never Inhabited Story and the Garden MY GRANDMOTHER MARY ALICE kept her big, tissue-paged Bible beside her party-line telephone and flipped through it, reading here and there, as she listened in on the stories being told along the Edmond Road. Even now, many of my kin keep Bibles by them the way…
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