Before I formed you in the womb, my son,I knew you. Knew you long before that highspring day in the sixth year of the reignof FDR, when the full-leaved sycamores that frame the tired river that runs Eastsmiled on your mother—just sixteen—andyour father, twenty-one, when they cametogether . . . . Continue Reading »
You’re bound to lose: the house will always win,in time. At first, though, Fortune flatters thosewho yield to her enticements. You beginwith bits of luck, small stakes. If you propose a higher sum, she’ll play her violin,flash gold-flecked eyes, throw you a long-stemmed rose.When bets get high, . . . . Continue Reading »
now thou but stoop’st to me—Ben Jonson The falcon like a teardrop heaven criesfrom higher than the city’s tallest towerdesigned to fall precisely through clear skiesnow hurtles at two hundred miles per hourAt such a speed what keeps her flashing eyesfrom drying out her lungs from ripping . . . . Continue Reading »
Those familiar with Christian Wiman’s career will know he has explored various forms: poetry, anthology, criticism, and memoir. Zero at the Bone combines each of his talents to produce something familiar and yet strangely new. Continue Reading »
Winter is a bad time. Whether for a season or for a life, it dampens the self. Or so a recent writer claimed. “Mankind endured a long winter of the Dark Ages” for a thousand years, “repressing” the human spirit in a barren season that lasted centuries. The human individual, as fate would . . . . Continue Reading »
The day I lost my sight,I could no more see you, my love,Still God is in the remnant. The day I can not hearYour lovely voice reveal your thoughts,Yet God is in the remnant. The day I can not moveMy lips to speak my love to you,Still God is in the remnant. The day I lose my memory,And all the times . . . . Continue Reading »
Sing, O Muse, of the man of many reverses,the man with a mind of many winding ways,turned around and turned away from homethere on the open labyrinthine sea,of the man of many dodges, the windspunweathervane of a wanderer, navigatorforever divagating, of the man with a mindingeniously devious, the . . . . Continue Reading »
Life wreathes flowers for death to wear. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), who said as much, is dead and gone, his sonnets deader still, if we may judge by classroom syllabi and the infrequency with which his name appears in the leading periodicals. He still crops up half a dozen times a decade . . . . Continue Reading »
For pleasure, Fortune, a designer, weaves.We are her stuff—yarn, thread, and loom, ideal.Her tapestry seems flawless; she conceivesit cunningly, attended by her wheel, whose mechanism works, apparently.But might there be a wheel of Providencethat goes around, beyond contingency? It waits . . . . Continue Reading »
He is a churchyard. In his grasses, crossesHave blossomed once again, like quartered rosesThat know the real crowns are made of thorns.Redolent cedar, these, both kings and thronesIn one, and no, they aren’t marking graves.Here is no fear and trembling. No one grieves.No sickness unto death, no . . . . Continue Reading »
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