Finding soft ground in my spirit upon which to land — Were I to wander, say, to a country stream, wade in, water curled and cool about my ankles, then bend my tired knees, bring my fingertips low, to feel the gentle song of the current, would that melody — an angel’s weeping, a fairy’s aria — sweep straight through me to be…

They asked where to find you, said you had all but disappeared. They asked me for your likeness and I told them — At the bottom of the laundry hamper where a little ink stain sits along the stitches of the liner. There, and in the back of the produce drawer, clinging to dust and leaked…

Gratitude comes heavy and whole from their hearts — There is, somewhere, the bluest sunshine you’ve seen. The sky and sun forget their borders and instead, show each other off. Look how brightly the sky shines. Look, how blue the sun. And the people below feel proud to have stood beneath such a union. These people, these children, are fed minute to minute, day…

Ah yes, those bleary-eyed hours when my feet ache, my shoulders pull, my neck perches like a wire — tense and pulsing, hunger hums through me like a white noise, backbone stretching, straightening, falling again with my breath into the cradle of my center. I’m bony, too bony, perhaps, but…

I found a house once, as a child, that had been left. It was a wooden home with a brick chimney, and parts of the walls had crumbled, leaving it open to the fields. A fallen pine, I think, lay across its beams, the deadened branches reaching into the little…

A great English thinker and theologian wrote one of my favorite lines: “There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.” — G.K. Chesterton Tonight I’m sitting in my small, tidy apartment, mentally applying this logic to my humble…

Isn’t it strange we dress ourselves in so many skins? — Elbows lost in a rack of silk surrongs my mind starts to want some numbers. Like, how many fingertips have ever buttoned a blouse? How many palms have ever brushed the shoulders of a suit jacket, and how many chins have lifted in the mirror at the sight of stately…

How easy to forget, in February, that soon the ground will come alive again. Some things have no memory — being stiff we cannot recall the softness. Being chilled, we cannot imagine our way to warmth, just as being poor, one cannot remember himself to plenty. What a feat of…

I believed in the urgency with which your hands jumped to mine and held tight, like a robin’s feet to the branch. Sometimes your arms ache with the power you’ve stored inside them, and sometimes they appear to be as small as mine, hunched and folded. That day when we…