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Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. —Rainer Maria Rilke

In copious curls, her brown hair
         reaches the small of her back,
                  a tangle she can barely brush

He had been a stranger,
so took in strangers,
today three, and
in the heat of the day.
He interrupts my spinning
wool for his new cloak,
orders me to make a fire,
use my best meal
to make cakes
for heaven’s sake,
tells the servant boy
to slaughter that calf
I’ve had my eye on.
Of course I listened
behind our tent’s flap.
How else do we women
learn anything important?
How peculiar of them
to speak of a son
to such as we are,
such as I am who

Poet Peter Cooley logs the year following his wife’s death with courage and brutal honesty.

This morning, I headed to
the woods as I do each morning
without a single thought of

accomplishing anything in
my mind, and why should I?
My dog, always eager for

a walk, doesn’t ever
imagine some future delight,
but lives headlong into

unknowable possibilities
of joy with a reckless disregard
of order or propriety.

She refuses the press
of anxiety that seems to wait
for us at every crossroads,

holding her head high
to catch what the wind brings,
facing the heart of now

Roberts Rurans is a freelance illustrator from Riga, Latvia, who begins his works solely by hand with paint before later applying a digital postproduction process. Influenced at first by the minimalism of modern art, with its exaggerations of form, Rurans has since delved into the past to find inspiration in the intricacy and meaning of medieval art. His stylized, bright work features clean, clear lines and large swatches of color.

It was a one-man show, that wild man dunking each
man, woman, and child into the river with a blessing,
which by the time it was our turn
was brown with mud
the banks a mess of footprints.

It took hours to reach him.
My father prayed the whole time,
swaying with his angst, and my mother,
responsible for comforting us,
got a bit tense around her mouth.

Because where were we to sleep if night fell?
What were we to eat?
Yet the whole long day, sun high above,
everyone in line was peaceful and calm.

—in memoriam, Jacqueline Cooley, 1944–2018

Pray for me, I asked the trees.
Or did I order them? Or just stand still
while the wind bore its song among the branches
carrying us both forward, backward, forward,
marrying us to morning light.

In the grief-room-tangle of my hands
folded together to confront the day,
I’ve found all things necessary to construct a life,
a few blues notes or a new agon to slip on.

Lying in bed and listening, I heard devotion. And creativity. And mystery.

His art is like the man who created it: joyful, loving, and gently curious.

“I was a child who loved to read. But I didn’t see a lot of characters that looked like me.”