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Sunbeams

“Which foolish man was it who said love was simple?” she murmured. “Ah, yes, it was Rodolphe. But which Rodolphe?”

Leon Garfield

November 1992

Without A Name For You

Hannah Arendt says a fundamental contradiction of the United States is political freedom coupled with social slavery.

Sunbeams

“You seem to be reacting to your boyfriend as if he were your father,” your shrink may say stonily (unless she is a strict Freudian, in which case she’ll shut up and wait until you think of it yourself, a process that usually takes ten years. This is why strict Freudians have such lovely summer houses.).

Cynthia Heimel

My Savior Jesus

Not Jesus on the cross / but Jesus the boy / by himself, shivering, gazing into the water, / his hand cupping his scrotum, / the puzzling extra organ / attached outside his body. / I could believe in this Jesus.

Uncommon Prayer

Toward A New Liturgy

There is something that loves you in the world. The voice that speaks to you within, in the worst despair, is not different from the voice that called the world into being.

Selected Poems

Encounter Above Tintern Abbey

Then he let go of me, and the meaning of the poem was clear. This man had finally brought me inside of it. Both of us had somehow been given what we came for. On the trail down to the bridge I broke out in goose flesh.

Drowning

At the age of two, I saw the ocean for the first time. I threw wide my short arms and ran shouting, straight into the Pacific, where an undertow reached out to embrace me. I still remember the upside-down whirlpool of warmth, like the womb out of which I’d so recently swum.

J. Robert Oppenheimer & The Gypsies

Mark’s forehead smacks against the visor, but he’s held in by the steering wheel. Cindi finds herself in the air, and there is a moment of crazy exhilaration as she sees the jeep spin beneath her, as if some childhood dream of flying has come true.

Sunbeams

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

James Baldwin