Issue 68

Over many years, I have dreamed away my color and turned inside out, like the wet machinery of an orange. I’m all yard; the sycamores are my likeness.

Living in that wet belly was a long flight through driving rain, destination this thin river of a life made from petal, paper and some such flimsy stuff. Soul doesn’t need much to keep herself clean and combed, even if the body winds up a hobo or murderer, she knows how to make of herself…

Carpenter means Jesus—his hands to splinters, a bench to sand and rub smooth corners from the tree’s needle skin to build a boat. I want to follow Christ, but where? To a threshold—a place to marry, a pulpit where the preacher sweats, a precipice, the last land seen as others wave, that boat sails out,…

 Jeanne Murray Walker is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently A Deed to the Light (University of Illinois Press) and New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Century, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Image, and Best American Poetry. She is also an accomplished playwright, whose scripts have been performed in theaters…

Outside, the traffic stutters, some drivers blow their horns and the impulse bolts in dendrite-leaps from car to car. I’d like to think it’s the bellow of my stiff-necked Hebrews, shofars raised to lips, razing, man to man, the walls of Jericho to its stony knees. But it’s more how a monkey lopes— branch to…

Soon, soon enough, all of this, this lived life, this navy-blue couch, your confetti-splashed, yellow-striped skirt spread across it, your lovely legs beneath the skirt, the joyous aroma of toast in the toaster, a ball bouncing and the cry of boys, all of it will assume the stilted look of my childhood photographs. 1958, ’59.…

Virgin of the milk, you enchant words and they enchant you. As I grow older, leave powdered sugar on my shoulder and the smell of hunger on my neck. Bear with me, your lonely neighbor and his cup of nothing. Even your glance can be as uselessly pure as the tongue of a lion or…

Proverbs master the man. He longs to be simple who writes a proverb. A proverb well chosen for a tombstone is a life. He who does not understand a proverb is the hole in a wire hanger. The weakest proverb is great, though a great proverb is never weak. There is no weak proverb. A…

ART MAY BE CONCERNED with the creative manipulation of images, but words are always part of the picture. When we encounter a work of art, a load of labels and captions, categories and explanations always works to help or hinder our better understanding. Some are printed on the wall beside the work; others we carry inside…

Goldfish in the horse trough nibble at morning’s surface. They are not busy; they are breathing. The sparrow threading straw under the eaves lifts whips of time to his mate’s music. This is the opposite of business. Birds, even singing, can be the architects of our silence. Would you be healed by being? Then be…