Issue 77

I am much comforted by ordinary things by the whalebone covers of my missal sadly worn and warmer to my hand than amber or by the cry of gulls greedy as pagans for the bread we throw on seas so troubled and so terrible I am amazed God made them except I stand upon a…

Three dreams and modernity appear in the scene, hand in hand with misgiving: November 10, 1619 A phantom touch and the soul folded on its lungs and dragged its good half leftward, heart over foot, wheezing and shamed. The phantom mouths blew around and blinded the soul and spun it on its foot like a…

If it happens, it must be by chance, the one bum note the slight misstep that leads toward an “ageless wisdom that outlasts all things else,” by which Augustine means his god and his god only, and not the Peavey amps, the wires coiled into a snare in the practice room adjoining a neighbor’s summer…

Walking the baby at noon along our vacation road I turned toward a lit hum animating old oaks ryegrass salvia thistle wild distance folding six white boxes’ uncountable pale thoughts measuring the air our foreign bodies nearly colliding but clearer, wouldn’t— not mine, hum I heard only when the baby slept against me. I was…

What we built to hold us, the year’s memory, menus and daytrips, after a while came loose. Those nights we balanced on each other’s mistakes, cradling our wine: twigs those branches now. Who knew what lived there? She she she called one bird. What lived there knew its place. Another bird splits its nest wide,…

Orphan or heir-apparent, did it plummet from heaven or work its way up through the fissures of the earth? Was it chipped from a dollhouse window or a diamond fjord? If the deepest bass virtuoso intones the nethermost D, will this sliver fly off to reunite with its source, setting off a flood of healing…

–after Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia In the garden, all the apples have returned to us, dangling gold leaf shiny from the trees, and under their bowers we walk, our drowsy feet crushing the flowers, carnations, pinks, violas, dahlias— All of our dead have returned to us, their faces wrinkled with the labor of the…

Crows, like ghosts flocked in a field of asphodels, gather. They startle up in the air, drop like a length of chain. She could call their cold caws lamentation or laughter. It is hard to recall what she did not know Before she knelt here: the brayed past smudged from too much handling. (Was there…

Here—the terminus from which he begins. The road, tilted like a tipped-up tile, Points to those in trees pulling down branches. Wind rucks and buckles the cloak-covered path. Soon enough the day will be a ruin. Soon the crisp half-light of dusk will give way To the salt-light of stars, a gibbous moon. Although foretold,…

What I have come to say is never quite _____sufficient; what I have come to say falls ever short, if reliably—my one, _____my only certainty. This fact, for now, can prove both deep discouragement and deep, _____elusive hope. I’ve come to trust our words’ most modest crapshoot; I have come, as well, _____to see their…