Kathleen L. Housley

Kathleen L. Housley is a freelance writer in Glastonbury, Connecticut.

Articles by Kathleen L. Housley

Poetry

Cold comfort

Jun 02, 2009 by Kathleen L. Housley
The way Herod liked to listen to John the Baptist,
summoning him from his cell for private chats
but could make no sense of what he said; the way
Festus kept the apostle Paul locked up for two years
because he enjoyed hearing him talk, although his words
made him afraid; the way the German guards, terrified
by night bombings, sought out Pastor Bonhoeffer,
even though he was, by his own account, a provider
of cold comfort, writing to a friend, “I can listen all right,
but hardly ever find anything to say. Yet perhaps the way
one asks about some things and is silent about others
helps suggest what really matters”—did not stop
the sharp rap on the prison door or the words “get ready
to come with us” as if for one more quiet conversation
about what really matters.
Poetry

Millipede

Jun 17, 2008 by Kathleen L. Housley
Holy Spirit: do not descend as a dove.
Better to return as a millipede hidden
beneath decaying bark than anything
that can soar. Ponder the incarnational
worth of Pneumodesmus Newmani,
the oldest known form of life on land,
linking air breathing with the surname
of the Scottish bus driver and amateur
paleontologist who chiseled its fossil
from harbor rocks north of Stonehaven,
observing through his field lens small
openings in its exoskeleton used
for inspiration, meaning it moved its
many legs on dry ground, not seabed.
Or consider this descendent of Pneumo,
younger by four hundred million years,
curled for self-preservation on my palm,
a hard button of red legs whorled inward,
circled by dark armor plate, both of us
breathing air while we wait for a sign
that it is safe to resume whatever it was
we were scurrying to do prior to this
disruption of our forward flow to make
a theological point: Of what use are
metaphors of flight for things with feet?
Poetry

Self-portrait

Apr 17, 2007 by Kathleen L. Housley
After four years, Michelangelo has reached the end,
and now Jonah, whom he has reserved for last,
dangles his bare feet over the Sistine’s void,
sharing his precarious aerie with a dead fish,
two cherubs and a vine. A marvel of foreshortening,
he reclines on his arm and eyes God, still arguing
petulantly that he is not the man to undertake
such a harebrained job, lacking both talent
and inclination. His fingers point in opposite
directions, one to the threat of Nineveh and Rome,
the other to the safety of Tarshish and Florence,
regarding his own death as a small price to pay
to make a point. Yet as the fresco dries to stone,
he gazes beyond the gap between his intractable
pique and God’s intractable grace, dumbfounded
at the resplendent vault arching above a city at peace.
Poetry

Michelangelo and the angels

Jan 23, 2007 by Kathleen L. Housley
The trouble is the halo. He’s never dissected one,
prying it open with a blade under cover of night
to determine its component parts: seeking with his
fingertips for the thin band of cartilage that holds
it erect, or the branched nerves channeling light
as coldly steady as foxfire on a rotting log.
The same goes for wings. Without evidence
from his cadavers, he dispenses with them,
painting angels as fit as young quarrymen
and pasta-loving cherubs to whom aerodynamic
principles will never apply. Even God looks
as if he climbs into bed each night stiff
from a hard day’s work but not ready for sleep,
his brain crammed with thumbnail sketches
of airy beings aglow with inexhaustible fuel
flying by faith in unborn Bernoulli’s constant.



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