Freude: On Hearing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony after a Two-Year Pandemic Delay
The master couldn’t hear his work, but here we are listening together— where the flowing waters meet— to Beethoven’s final symphony. The contrasts and crescendos at times too much: a smile releases the mind’s discomfiture. The trumpet player drinks some water, waiting for his chance, the ringing choir is a morose tribunal peering down on…
Tyndale
Your words, six hundred years old, fill our minds: my brother’s keeper and let there be light, it came to pass and seek and ye shall find, plain-put so in faith we’ll fight the good fight. What’s that you said? The boy who drives the plow should know more of the scriptures than a priest?…
Our Equinox
For Adriano The kids emerge to afternoon from ancient doors At St. Mary’s, pre-Ks eager to dash and hide Around the green at Gregory College House. It’s hard to tell which one’s mine, which is yours, As they frolic and tumble, dive and slide Down grass, spin a circle,…
Post-Blizzard
I A haggard rabbit sits in the shadows of the eaves of the house, looking out at the snowbound yard with its marble eye and wondering what we’re all wondering: how am I supposed to get through this? Up the street someone has revved a snow blower and begun chugging down the sidewalk in the…
Wring the Changes
I have known the breathless feeling of a sponge that has been wrung thoroughly and roughly above my life’s chipped sink, squeezed to the point of tearing by the chapped hands of God until my shape was nothing. Until I could not think. I have known the way one squishes at the crushing of one’s…
Dead Shall Rise
Thanks to the ubiquitous suburban aversion to rake, which I take to be a sub-function of an associated suspicion re: work, one now can see it in meatspace— as I think the new term is for “real”— most days, even in rain: the rise, as browning, skeletal, blood once red even or golden over leaves…
In the Sandbox
For L & S Sand sifting through and over your fingers: that is power enough, for you know that to build is to be divine in this small world. By your spoon and single truck, you are deified, as deliberate as—or more than—those kings of old Mesopotamia steering their kingdoms of clay. ~ ~ ~…
Canzoniere 349
At every hour I seem to hearthe messenger she sends to me,and so I change incessantly,diminished by each passing yearas my reflection turns unclear;I spurn the way I used to be.I long to know when I’ll be freealthough that moment should be near.How joyous it will be to flyfrom earthbound jails and scatter frailand mortal…
West Nickle Mines School Shooting
Man enters classroom, opens fire; Five Amish girls will die today— Doves take flight from schoolhouse spire. Two daughters cast upon the pyre Their lives in hope it might allay The man with gun who opens fire. While outside, as police conspire— the press reports, the parents pray; Doves will cry, hearts expire. Word travels…
The Collar
pulls my poverty in among the poor, tugs my stiff-necked affluence toward Jesus understudies, breathing icons I’m priest-inclined to pass on the street.