The bugs come out — insects of all kinds — at twilight, when the heat of the day is no longer congealing their blood. Microcosm of blood in microcosmic veins. Don’t ask me for accuracy; I’m no scientist. I only know what I see: Ocular proof at evening, when the sun slides, bloody, into the... Continue Reading →

Believe, if you like, in the Providence of poison ivy: One lone stalk of it caught amid the milkweed. Stop with your gloves on, considering. Then, bend and see the chrysalis, cradled there on one single leaf of three. Believe (if you like) that it was meant to be: Reprieve from some on-high emperor of... Continue Reading →

This morning, I looked up from my desk in a yellow-painted room to the oblong window just above me.   I saw beyond the rain-specked glass a profusion branches. Thick and thin and layered over each other in patterns I could not discern, they were black and leafless against a white sky brimming with rain.... Continue Reading →

Sometimes you have to plunge with the bucket, go down deep to the very end of your rope, past stones which seem to narrow towards blackness, whose moss watches, imperturbable, as you fall.  Sometimes you have to let the slack run out, hope the line will spare you the smack of water.  Sometimes you must... Continue Reading →

There is no “fair.”  Fair’s a thing that we’ve cooked up: A should be that never could be, nor ever has been, nor ever will be.  Cancer isn’t fair anymore than it was fair the day your friends surprised you with that meal and birthday cake and love you hadn’t earned.  Fair is what we... Continue Reading →

In the hallway, sounds. The snap of plastic bags ripped open, cart wheels rattling under pill bottles rattling, and under that the nurses’ laughter, casual, for all the crisp staccato of their morning rounds.  Nothing of it makes me feel less alone, here by a window where the sun rose blank and white without my... Continue Reading →

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with... Continue Reading →

See: Luke 1: 3-25 Even not speaking, he fussed. For herself, Elizabeth would have been happy to go out into the streets, visiting. She would have invited the neighbors to every meal. It wasn’t that she wanted to gloat or to prove anything; those desires had vanished entirely the moment she knew it was true.... Continue Reading →

Imagine for a moment, if you please, that minds are just machines for making sense of things. Feed the random inputs in: Banana, napkin, purring cat; the rhythmic tickticktick of a clock that hasn’t sent its broken bird out for decades. Fits the pattern, if you think of it, of a still life you looked... Continue Reading →

She wondered that the chains they’d always talked about could slip away so easily if only you walked out. That day she walked out of a forest barely worthy of the name, out of the tarpaper shack in a stand of scrubby pines behind a strip-malled strip of highway running between two nowheres. That day,... Continue Reading →