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What shall I say, Lord, now that the wordskeep stumbling, tumbling like loose marblesacross the table then down onto the floor,bouncing and scattering this way and that? What shall...

Before I formed you in the womb, my son, I knew you. Knew you long before that high spring day in the sixth year of the reign of FDR,...

You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It...

Sixteen and a half with a brand new driver’slicense in my wallet, driving my father’s’47 two-toned old clunky Pontiac, I turnedleft off Hempstead Turnpike when a car swimsshark-like in...

Black velvet darkness, tufts of shredded clouds heading slow-ly up the coast, the lamp-like February snow moon the hostthe celebrant raises at the Consecration steady above the coast,transfiguring the...

Mid-September, dear woman, and the monarchlights once more upon the purple panopliedbutterfly bush in the now-decaying garden,as it has for these past thirty Septembers. And once again, like the...

A Saturday night, late February. Eileen and mein the back of the cramped car, Julie driving,Bruce riding shotgun. We’re heading downto Amherst for an evening of Borscht Belt vaudeville,Fifty...

And then, in an instant, it’s gone: the world of East Fifty-First.Gone the round-the-clock clack of the Third Avenue El,the clutch-grinding rattle of Fords and the clop clopof those...

A paralyzing gelid vortex of a January morning. He lay under the covers as the beckoning New Year’s sun began to manifest itself through the curtains of his bedroom...

With my father’s Army ballpeen hammer I’d found down in the cellar, I kept banging on the swordblade, trying to turn it back into a plowshare like the ones...

How old the story is, we have come to see, and yet how true. The kid’s back home at last, knowing he’s lost everything the old man gave him,...

In the hot Washington afternoon, in one of those endlessly bustling government offices, there sits a man named Michael J. Astrue, the fifty-four-year-old head of the Social Security Administration....