The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1432 Hush, lamb, lavish with blood in madder red, Your varnish overfed, Too fat for this thin season.Hush, choir—be-rubied, embroidered, unsomber As the lute tuned To your organ’s lustrous umber.And all you pious press in festal vestments, Silken chevaliers And saints, fold up your …
1 The neighbor dowsed our yard with a peach branch, watching it bend when he walked on water. Dad and I followed a few feet behind, out of his path. It was a science, well witching. He could find springs too. 2 The radiologist located, with a CAT scan, the area where blood had pooled …
When my father was twenty-two years old, one of his closest friends died suddenly. After the first few moments of shock wore off, my father remembered the night before. In his room, as he lay down to sleep, a ball of light appeared near the ceiling. Just like that. A ball of light hovered above …
Compact Jazz recording, 1989 Nina Simone, accompanying herself on piano Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer. —Gaston Bachelard In 1980, my mother lay dying. Her death that July guided me north to a high Victorian mansion in upstate New York and, within just three days, to my beloved. He too was …
Dr. Gordon had ordered a CAT scan. MRI. Full panel of blood work. And now the wires on my head. All because I’d screwed Bethany Hollis in her stepfather’s bedroom. And then I’d done a real dumb thing afterward. “Stop picking,” my mother said. I kept itching around the electrodes. We were sitting on the …
We’ll herd the loved ones from the tents to a low fence to present a live feed of the mine courtesy of Prairie Vision, the TV station I own or, rather, used to own. I had to step aside due to a perceived conflict of interest when I got elected governor. My adviser Eddie held …
Rita came home from the war. The town was not as if she had never left. Some things had changed. The Taco Bell, for instance, was closed, but another had opened on the next street. The Church of the Passionate Blood, with its stained-glass Christ as slim and pale and sweet as a glow- worm, …
Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Frank Bidart. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017. 736 pp. $40.00 (cloth). Like music, poetry—or at least our experience of it—is an art that unfolds over time. One cannot read every word in a poem at once, after all, and so readers must give themselves over to reading’s timeline. Without tools like …
Louise Dupré was born on July 9, 1949, in Sherbrooke, Québec. At the time, Québec was in the grips of “la Grande Noirceur,” or Great Dark- ness, of the rigidly conservative Duplessis era. But Dupré’s more liberal upbringing anticipated the enormous changes that were about to take place in the province. Members of her mother’s …
All around, too many dramas that I had to keep to myself, far, far too much silence. As if, in revealing human misery I’d risk being devoured, ripped wide open in the public square, voracious beasts snuffing through my entrails. And yet, to write begins with the shame of a sordid death, always one’s own, …