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Blind Angels

Pittsburgh, at the end of another terribly hot day in an unending string of terribly hot days, is a forge, the air like damp, tepid gauze. The people on the streets look stretched, desperate, short-tempered. My poetry reading, part of the eighteen-day Bloomfield Sacred Arts Festival, is being held in the Bloomfield Art Works, a small, un-air-conditioned gallery on Liberty Avenue. Its walls are covered with “sacred” art, mostly paintings, photographs, and drawings of angels. The subjects possess that characteristic ethereal androgyny, that feathery beauty that has become cliché. They are intriguing, but, in the main, I’m tired of angels.

Mercy

Serial killer Richard Speck, a free spot-weld, an Oreo cookie

The Leader Of The Synagogue

Notes From A Desert Sanctuary

I’ve just driven 550 miles from LA to a monastery located in the desert a couple of hours northwest of Las Vegas. The moment I spot the Celtic cross atop the adobe chapel and pull in, I see that one of my lessons for the next week is going to concern the gap between expectations and reality. I’ve been picturing a flowering-cactus-festooned oasis; instead, the property is next to a state highway and is home to more double-wide trailers than cactuses.

April 2001

When we see ourselves as we truly are, we call it “enlightenment”; we call it “salvation.” The words don’t matter. What matters is that the broken heart is lifted; the light returns.

Sunbeams

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us, and call that handful of sand the world.

Robert Pirsig

November 2000

In the moonlight, I study the face of the woman I’ve loved for eighteen years. I’m thankful the moonlight traveled such a vast distance tonight, just so I could see her sleeping.

Traveling Mercies

I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I remembered that wonderful line of Blake’s — that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love — I took a long, deep breath and forced these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”

September 2000

The English language sighs. The politicians can’t keep their hands off her. They buy her clothes. They buy her jewelry. They can’t stop making promises. How weary she is, and the campaign has only just begun.