%1

In a time of no wind, in a spell of stasis after stars.
In the almost morning morning, in the dawn before
the solar dawning, the pause before the prelude,
the hush that wombs the day, just stay, stay put
before the roving eye can see, before the ear can hear
the no-news news. Be here, exactly where you are,
and where you aren’t, in the unsown garden,
in the sheer unknowing, in the windless blowing,
in the fenceless land, in the I before the I began.
Abide, don’t hide, but neither spin the wheel of fate.

Fifties split-level, clapboards olive green
When we moved in that June. Big trees green, too.
(We’d come from a gaunt, treeless subdivision.)
Green, too, the nearby river and a fence
Of painted wood, a four-foot outfield fence
Prettying up the nearby baseball diamond.
How happy these things seemed to me at ten,
Even though I’d heard poured out inside our car—
Father, small sister, mother up in front,
And in the back, two younger brothers, me—
My parents’ ample fears about the price.

Matt and Adam talk with constitutional scholar Steve Bragaw about the theological implications of stealing the Declaration of Independence

It’s the memory of your harmonies and the grim house
lifting in your ebullience that I’m holding against
this deadly fugue, the flight from everything and nothing
we the world have known. 

I would be singing somewhere in the house
and you’d come streaming into the song,
your strong alto current bearing my higher notes
into joy that was, I see now, a resistance

For those who work in health care, the COVID-19 crisis is taking quite a toll. Many nurses are short not only on medical supplies but on sustaining hope. Cady Chaplin, an ICU nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, has worked with artist Elizabeth Jaeger to bring artists together to show appreciation for health-care workers. When Chaplin’s ICU was designated as a COVID-19 response unit, she requested a “guerrilla gallery of support from the community.” She and Jaeger reached out to artists to create free, downloadable posters to be placed in break rooms for hospital staff.

Quiet.

Even the locusts have vanished,
taking their strange invisible castanets with them.

Where are the birds? Too silent, for June.
The longest day was yesterday.

Darkness descends from now on,
sidling in like some hairy beast
with an eye that glitters in the twilight.

The first rush of flowers, potted
at the back door: silver mound a backdrop
for red geraniums, and lavender spikes
raised in blessing.

Daily rain for months. The green
glows neon. The fox a russet flash.

Like unsigned poems, are everywhere in everything, the center
of a sentence unsighed the chains of a hoop still rattling long after
the ball has passed through on its perfect arc. We half-see
in the place we pass through—a haunting that is only a space
where something else has lived, still resonant. Whitman said
to look for him beneath our feet in the dust rising. To believe
that we are made of Whitman dust, in dusk, stars flickering. We
carry the ache of our own loss like someone searching for the keys

River Seine, 2006

So, you decide this is worth
writing about, or painting—
the shapes of the branches on
the trees, how the afternoon sun
gleams on the mottled trunks,
how their reflections echo in the river.

You cannot change the image;
it has been there for centuries.
All you can do is move your own
body, shifting the angle here and there,
back and forth, so that you
see the thing differently,
until you find a satisfaction.

New collections by Jeanine Hathaway and Jeanne Murray Walker

David Baird’s artistic practice is intimately entwined with his work as an architect. He begins each day by painting, experimenting with countless geometric variations. In a recent series, he overlays biblical texts with columnar forms which migrate across collaged pages. Even when he is not working directly with scripture, an exegetical impulse runs through much of Baird’s work, especially the wooden constructions he produced for his show at Wesley Theological Seminary, entitled Between the Lines: Biblical Speculations.