A Letter from Brooklyn An old lady writes me in a spidery style, Each character trembling, and I see a veined hand Pellucid as paper, travelling on a skein Of such frail thoughts its thread is often broken; Or else the filament from which a phrase is hung Dims to my sense, but caught, it …
Yearly Archives: 2006
Poems for the Easter Octave VI
Everything is Going to be All Right How should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and a high tide reflected on the ceiling. There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The lines flow from the hand unbidden and …
Poems for the Easter Octave V
O Taste and See The world is not with us enough O taste and see the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning if anything all that lives to the imagination’s tongue, grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh our deaths, crossing the street, plum, …
Poems for the Easter Octave IV
Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a …
Poems for the Easter Octave III
Seven Stanzas at Easter Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and …
Poems for the Easter Octave II
Happiness There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, …
Poems for the Easter Octave I
Missing God His grace is no longer called for before meals: farmed fish multiply without His intercession. Bread production rises through disease-resistant grains devised scientifically to mitigate his faults. Yet, though we rebelled against Him like adolescents, uplifted to see an oppressive father banished – a bearded hermit – to the desert, we confess to …
Tuesday Week 5 of Lent
It looks like both Moses and John accept the homeopathic principle—that like cures like, that a hair of the dog that bit you does you good. If you’ve been bitten by a fiery serpent—whatever that is—what you need is another serpent that has been through the fire—cast from molten bronze—and lifted up on a standard. …
All Quiet on the Posting Front…
Loyola Hall is in the middle of its season of spirituality courses and I am working at full capacity or, given the ME/CFS, slightly beyond it. The courses though are something I love to be involved with–there is such a palpable sense of God at work during them. A week ago was ‘Theology and Spiritual …
St Joseph, Husband of Mary
There’s been an interesting protest march today in the North East—from Chester-le-Street to Durham Cathedral. The Northumbrian Association is marking St Cuthbert’s Day by also unveiling a petition demanding the return of the historic Lindisfarne Gospels, which were written by monks on the island, and are currently held at the British Library in London. They …