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The Marriage Bed

A rouge wave, a hand-bound journal, a Catholic priest

Finding A Good Man

I have not been in a relationship with a man for more than a year now, a situation that has resulted in a dangerously high increase in my doughnut consumption. I eat doughnuts each time I realize, with fresh pain, that the men I’m attracted to are completely out of reach: monogamous, left-leaning, gentle-spirited, broad-shouldered carpenters with a love for the works of minor poets — and, inevitably, a family.

The Morning After

A beautiful, naked woman on a white horse; a marriage proposal; a Dustbuster

The Light

Sunbeams

Tell me what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

Sunbeams

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go — if there are no doors or windows — he walks through a wall.

Bernard Malamud

Before The Fall, The Fullness

My son Josh once wrote me a letter in which he described hiking alone in the mountains of Ecuador, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. The tiny lights of a village shone below him, and the snowcapped cone of a volcano was visible in the distance. “The stars and planets are incredibly low, large, and brilliant here,” he wrote. The tone of his letter was ecstatic, like Sufi poetry — love and immanence spiced with joy.

Sacraments

A sacrament is physical, and within it is God’s love; as a sandwich is physical, and nutritious and pleasurable, and within it is love, if someone makes it for you and gives it to you with love: even harried or tired or impatient love, but with love’s direction and concern, love’s again-and-again wavering and distorted focus on goodness, then God’s love, too, is in the sandwich.

Beach Boy

I am a moody, bookish teenager living in a small town on the coast. Ten miles offshore, the Isles of Shoals seem to hover, whispering of mystery, a promise unfulfilled, a gift forever withheld. In fact, the islands are easily reached by boat in an hour, and the one time I went there it was bleak and cold and a seagull swooped down with its sharp yellow beak and stole my sandwich. I prefer to regard them from the shore, imagining a paradise just beyond my reach.

Distance

Rain pounded on the train-station roof like kettle-drums. We were the only two foreigners in the waiting area, and faces turned each time we spoke, watching and listening. But this didn’t bother us. We had been in China long enough now that we were immune. We could say anything in public, as long as we said it in English.