Issue 71

Understand the light, then, and recognize it ————————–—Corpus Hermeticum ——————–Memory is a kind of accomplishment ————————William Carlos Williams I Birdsong on the book page, birdsong on the brown rug; fanfare of birdsong above the radio orchestra; birdsong in shafted light of the wooden blinds. In one moment I heard them—by which I mean they’d all…

Singer, songwriter, and Grammy-winning producer Joe Henry has been making records since 1986. He has released a dozen albums of his own songs, most recently Scar (2001), Tiny Voices (2005), Civilians (2007), Blood from Stars (2009), and Reverie (2011). Allmusic.com’s Thom Jurek writes that as a songwriter, Henry occupies “a space that only he and…

Our opened mouths close, but the soft boundary of our bodies remains porous for a while longer. An exchange keeps going on between the darker afternoon light inside and the brighter light outside. The day is loosening its hold. Birds flash across the windows, unidentified. We are still not back from wherever it is we…

I have often been afraid to think of Augustine thinking, his mind a field, he confesses, that must be worked with much cost and sweat, and he the farmer laboring. Just knowing how little one can know is enough for most, but not Augustine— whatever crept around in his mind had no right to privacy.…

CHARLOTTE HAD NO NOTION of blasting the top off Major Tidwell’s tall and elaborate Woodmen of the World monument. It was shaped like a tree with its limbs sawn off and, as anyone could see, it was an easy mark. Under normal circumstances, she would never have dreamed of it. The only reason she did…

I spring from the pages into your arms. Someone who once knew him said Walt Whitman sang before breakfast behind his bedroom door— broken arias, bits of patriotic tunes, the way my child sings this morning in early spring, the way the raucous mockingbirds fill the warming air with their own borrowed songs. The world…

Chuck Colson I ARRIVE IN TORONTO during gay pride week. The lampposts lining the city streets fly rainbow flags. Inside the Sheraton are still more rainbows, small ones on sticks stuck into the mulched flowerbeds surrounding the ten-foot waterfall cascading into a pool edged with flagstones. Every time I see one, I can’t help wondering…

A merciless night here for the trees. At dawn: stripped bushes, ————————–strewn branches. Surveying the scatter for the unbroken, I come up with crows. It’s random on the face of it, this ruthlessness, ——————————————this rampage— like most of the world’s violence, much of its love. Still, after long safety, who can resist ———————————a good dies…

My corkscrew willow’s the last each autumn to loose its slender fingers of dried gold; first each spring to clutch my heart with, overnight, a thousand fisted buds. Today, the last thing I would wish is another emblem of grit and continuance; still, my willow models a fierce, therapeutic rage, lashing the glass in a…

THE SPADE, ACCORDING to artist and former East Los Angeles gang member Fabian “Spade” Debora, is the craftiest card in the deck, the card that “takes all. The spade is a subtle and powerful symbol.” From that childhood insight, gleaned growing up in one of Los Angeles’s most violent public housing projects, came the graffiti…