WindhoverA Journal of Christian Literature

WindhoverA Journal of Christian Literature

January 2009 Volume 13

WindhoverA Journal of Christian Literature

Volume 13 • January 2009

EditorAudell Shelburne

Contributing Editors Joe R. Christopher Michael H. Lythgoe

Art EditorHelen Kwiatkowski

Print CoordinatorRandy Yandell

Student Assistant Editors Jenny Bell Beth Melles

Board of AdvisorsBrian Blackley, North Carolina State University

Laura Payne Butler, Sul Ross UniversityScott Cairns, University of Missouri

Theresa DiPasquale, Whitman CollegeJohn Shawcross, University of Kentucky

Chris Willerton, Abilene Christian University

Cover: Skull and Olives by William B. Montgomery © 2008

Cover design by Helen Kwiatkowski

Copyright © 2009University of Mary Hardin-Baylor PressDr. Jerry G. Bawcom, President & CEO

Belton, Texas

Contents

Forward

Donna Stjerna The Fall .......................................................................................1

Julie L. Moore Beneath the Moon ......................................................................2

Greg Garrett Beauty, The Divine, and the Artist ...........................................3

William Foy Coker Laid Bare ..................................................................................11 Relief .........................................................................................12

Angela O’Donnell St. Benedict’s Feast ..................................................................13 Christ’s Colors ..........................................................................14 St. Thomas ................................................................................15

Alan Berecka Meditation on Ephesians 5:2 ...................................................16 Meaning ....................................................................................17 The Relic ...................................................................................19

Chet Corey By Stained-Glass Light ............................................................21

John Jenkinson The Christian Poem..................................................................23 Mates .........................................................................................24

Michael H. Lythgoe Collage .......................................................................................25 Leaving Killeen on an Eagle ....................................................27 Joyful Mystery ..........................................................................28

Ted Barnes Artwork .....................................................................................29

Mark E. Harden Taps at Arlington......................................................................37

D. S. Martin Piano Lesson .............................................................................38 The Possibilities ........................................................................39

Albert Haley In Praise of Toast......................................................................40

Brady Peterson Onions .......................................................................................41 Still Life ....................................................................................42

Daniel Polikoff St. Pennant Melangell ..............................................................43

William Kelley Woolfi tt Baking Lessons .........................................................................45 Sand Mite Rosary .....................................................................46

Barbara Crooker Angels ........................................................................................47 Twenty-First Century Twenty-Third Psalm ...........................48

John H. Timmerman Anatomy of a Cemetery ............................................................49

Nathan Brown Tamales and Dirt ......................................................................58

Carolyn Luke Reding Ceremony ..................................................................................59

Lyman Grant It is not that I............................................................................60

John Alexanderson Promissory ................................................................................61

Tony Reevy Dreaming of Luminarias at Noche Buena ..............................62

Larry D. Thomas In Whiteness Bright and Vast .................................................64 Laundry Woman .......................................................................65 The Cross ..................................................................................66

William B. Montgomery Artwork .....................................................................................67

Joe R. Christopher Two Reviews: Interviews and Essays ......................................75

Michael H. Lythgoe Omnibus Poetry Book Reviews: So Much Smaller .................78

Contributors ................................................................................97

Invitations to Writers’ Festival .............................................105

Submissions and Subscription Information ......................106

ForwardI was appointed editor of Windhover and director of the Writers’ Festival at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in October of 2002. I am completing my fi fth volume (or sixth if you count the double volume in 2006 as two) of the journal and this January will mark my seventh Writers’ Festival. Both the journal and festival were founded by Donna Walker-Nixon, whose vision and determination to promote Christian writers still guide both operations.

Over the years, Chris Willerton and Joe Christopher have served as editors of the journal. They have done so without complaint, no small feat considering how busy and crowded our professional and personal lives can be. I thank them for their faithful service to Windhover.

While Joe continues in his role as editor, Chris has decided to transition into a different role and will now be serving on the Board of Advisors. In addition to Chris, the current board includes Brian Blackley (North Carolina State University), Laura Payne Butler (Sul Ross State University), Scott Cairns (University of Missouri), Theresa DiPasquali (Whitman College), and John Shawcross (professor emeritus, University of Kentucky). I appreciate their expertise, and I try to listen to their advice.

Michael Lythgoe, a frequent contributor of poetry, reviews, and photographs, has agreed to join the editorial staff of the journal. He has been one of the staunchest supporters of both the journal and festival since before I arrived on the scene. He provides invaluable help in lining up our keynote speakers for the Writers’ Festival. In addition to assisting with reading submissions, he will continue to write reviews for each issue. His efforts are a labor of love, and I could not complete the journal or festival without his help. I am pleased to welcome him offi cially as a contributing editor.

As print coordinator, Randy Yandell continues to assist us in production, overseeing the process from start to fi nish. He helps us with everything from typesetting and layout to quality control, and his efforts help to make the journal an attractive, pleasing publication.

Helen Kwiatkowski continues to serve as Art Editor of Windhover. She has produced striking covers and stunning

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art layouts since 2002, arranging for us to print works by Margie Crisp, Deborah Tharp, Elizabeth Culwell-Collins, Berry Klingman, Caryl Bryer Fallert, Barbara Fontaine-White, and Phillip Wade. We have invested much to provide high quality, four-color art for Windhover, and Helen’s efforts have made this investment worthwhile. This year we are pleased to feature works by William B. Montgomery, including his painting Skull and Olives on the cover. It participates in a rich tradition common in classical and renaissance art and literature. The tradition of momento mori includes images of death, often skulls. The refl ection on beauty and death is a reminder of mortality, an acknowledgement of how fl eeting life can be, and, paradoxically, a call to remember the truly eternal things. These reminders call us to enjoy what life we have but also to keep an eye on eternity.

I think you will enjoy the collection of poems, stories, essays, and reviews. We are especially grateful to Greg Garrett, who has offered us a chance to publish a chapter of his newest book. No Idea, a spiritual autobiography which will be a sequel to Cross-ing Myself, will be published by David C. Cook during the fall of 2009. In this chapter, Greg discusses the connection between art, beauty, and truth. In his essay, you will hear echoes of the aesthetics of Sidney, Shelley, Plato, and others, but you will also hear Greg’s distinct voice advocating good art.

While the arts seem expendable to many in our profi t-driven world, we have enjoyed the unwavering commitment of the President of UMHB, Dr. Jerry Bawcom. As Dr. Bawcom enters his fi nal year as president, it is fi tting that we dedicate this issue to him for all of his support over the years. We appreciate the continued support of the administration at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor.

Audell ShelburneEditor, Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature

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Donna Stjerna

THE FALL

The leaves,they are dancing on the ends of their branchestwirling bright dresses of red and gold.One fi nal bow at the end of the show,fl ashing their petticoats before letting go.One by one they gently fl oat down,unafraid of touching the ground.At my fi nal curtain call, may I not be afraid of the fall.

My living will is here in this song.Let the crowd cheer me onwhen my season is done.At the end of the play,let me give thanks for the long run.

The leaves, they are swirling, twisting and twirling,set free from the tree by an autumn breeze.Their grand fi nale is one I’ll rememberall through the long cold days of December.One by one they put on a show,teaching me just how to let go,so at my fi nal curtain call, I will not be afraid of the fall.

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Julie L. Moore

BENEATH THE MOON Art enables us to fi nd ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. —Thomas Merton

Walk with me beneath the moon’s candlelight.

Let’s shadow the easygoing creek And the locust trees poised on the edge of its bed,

Our voices silhouettes Of the crickets’ unbroken tune.

Walk with me as we rouse the spices

Of fallen leaves, our feetIn step with the fading breeze,

Our bodies like clouds, cloaked In the robe of evening,

Entering the open meadow.

Let’s walk beneath the luminescent lip Spilling its secrets, like we hope it will,

Onto our shoulders. Let’s stand then Like deer in the tall grass,

Still. Listening for direction.

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Greg Garrett

BEAUTY, THE DIVINE, AND THE ARTIST

Beauty, Part 1

I sat writing late this morning on the sunlit front porch of Ghost Cottage, the original ranch house from the 1890s here at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. I’m staying in the guest room of Ghost House for fi ve days while doing a Celtic retreat with my Scottish friend Philip Newell. And because the material world is so much a part of Celtic understanding—and because I am thinking so much about it for some writing projects and a class I’m teaching in the spring—I am thinking just now about beauty.

Nothing will make you feel that life is precious and the world is truly beautiful like surviving some danger—having, say, a horrible turbulent fl ight in a tiny jet, and then stepping out into the New Mexico sun, as I did yesterday.

The sky was blue, the clouds fl oating as though God had placed them up there himself, and the landscape was yellow, gray, black, orange.

When I reached Santa Fe, I was still thinking about beauty. At Maria’s, maybe my favorite restaurant in the entire world, I had a cold Dos Equis draft, a bowl of posole, and then a plate of carne adovado, pork cooked in smoky hot red chile. I got a bowl of green chile stew as take out, and ate it for supper in my room at Ghost Ranch.

Then I went out this morning for what I thought would be a long climb up past Kitchen Mesa and onto the Mesa Montosa, up into National Forest lands. There’s a peak in the back country about 8000 feet tall that I wanted to climb again, and I thought from the top of it I would take some great pictures with my new camera and have some pretty profound thoughts about beauty, truth, and the Divine.

But there was snow last night, and beautiful as the snow was, scattered across the ground, I lost the Kitchen Mesa trail and found myself climbing up and up the boulders of an ancient watercourse. That brought me to the base of the solid rock of the mesa, and I found a chimney that carried me up to the next ledge, and then to the next.

I thought maybe I could fi nd my way up without the trail.And then I got stuck. I hope no one will think less of me when I confess that heights

make me jelly-legged. With the wind whistling, the snow making

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every foot- and handhold treacherous, and a long vertical drop to my left, I began to experience some fear and trembling.

I couldn’t climb farther up from where I stood, and I couldn’t go back the way I’d come. I took off my backpack and dropped it down on the ledge below, since I thought I could climb down, and would do it more safely without it unbalancing me. It hit, rolled once, rolled twice, and almost plummeted over the precipice.

So that gave me a nice reminder of how much trouble I was in. Almost no one was at the Ranch, and literally no one knew where I was.

But I climbed down to my backpack, and then down a little further, looking for a way down off the wall of the mesa. Nothing. Nothing, that is, but a sheer forty-foot drop.

And then, as I cast around for something, anything, I saw a route, its handholds like bells ringing, back to a place I could backtrack.

So with grateful heart, I climbed up, then down, then bush-whacked across the face of the mesa, still looking for the trail.

So, you might be thinking, what does this adventure have to do with beauty?

Well, fi rst, I think there is always an element of the unexpected, the hazardous, even, in great art that helps account for its beauty. As Jeremy Begbie says about music—and it applies to a number of created things—that the beauty comes from the presence of the dis-equilibrating. Tension and discord knock you on your heels. And only then can the presence of the resolution give you aesthetic pleasure.

Second, for the course of three or four hours this morning, I was fully and completely alive in this physical world. My fi ngers were gripping sandstone. My feet slid on slippery snow. My lungs were fi lled with the sweet high desert air—and with the grit blowing back from a handhold that just disintegrated.

I am far from suicidal these days, and I do not go out of my way to court danger. If I had known I was going to come so close to get-ting frozen on the side of the mesa, I would not have gone up there. I have lots to live for, people I love who love me, and a vocation worth my fi nest work.

But for four hours this morning, I wasn’t reading about beauty, or looking at pictures of the outdoors on my computer.

I was in this great good creation of God, experiencing it—and him—directly. I was afraid—and grateful. I saw, felt, heard things I would never otherwise have experienced.

And I gained a lot of things to think about. I never did fi nd the trail, by the way. After I’d climbed down the

mesa, I jumped from boulder to boulder, down another ancient water-course, before following the streambed back to territory I did know.

On the way, I met a fl owing creek, fl ush with the same snow that

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had caused my diffi culties. Water is the surest and most beautiful of our sacramental elements, life-giving in itself and as a symbol, and here at Ghost Ranch, in the desert, I felt closest to understanding its importance to the great faiths that arose in the desert.

I was hot, sweating even, despite the cool air, and although I had water in my pack—and although I knew full well the possible discomforts of untreated water—I knelt and drank long of the cold clear burbling stream.

It felt like I was drinking God.To taste the world—the one sense I had not yet exercised today—

I was willing to risk some further discomfort.And I trusted that after yesterday’s feasts of red and green

chile, my intestines could handle anything I could possibly throw at them.

Beauty, Part 2

So last week I was climbing mesas in New Mexico and writing about the beauty of God’s creation. Today, I’m in Washington, DC, where I just got back from visiting the Phillips Collection, one of the great small art museums in the world. They’ve got Renoirs, Manets and Monets, Singer Sargents and Whistlers, Picassos, Braques, and at least one Pollock. They’ve got a Georgia O’Keefe painting of sandstone in the Northern New Mexico hills just a few miles away from Ghost Ranch, a painting that made me smile at the happy convergence of my recent and present.

And they’ve got an El Greco.It’s one of the all-time hits, “The Penitent St. Peter,” one of

those great glowing luminous fi gures only El Greco seems to have known how to paint and that no photo can ever do justice to. I came across it suddenly and unexpectedly, beautifully lit at the far end of a dark-paneled room. Although I’d been to the Collection once before, I had not remembered this painting—which I have loved since teaching it in undergraduate humanities classes twenty years ago—and I was stunned.

My hand rose to my chest. Again, I felt as though I was in the presence of something holy. I had an urge to cross myself, which I fought off not because it would have been inappropriate to what I was feeling, but because I didn’t want anyone to think I was ven-erating the painting.

Because that feeling of holiness didn’t come from the painting, although I believe the painting was inspired. Like the New Mexico landscape I wrote about last week, the sense of the divine was coming from my contact with something tangible, physical, like all things sacramental, mediated through something created.

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Only this week (and often, I must confess, in my experience), the creation that was sparking my closeness to God was a human creation.

Okay, we might say. Devotional subject, Old Master, Greg gets a little spiritual tickle from it. Fine.

But how do we explain that I also got that holy elbow in the ribs from a room full of Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings? From Renoir’s sunlit party scene, “Luncheon of the Boating Party”?

From, for crying out loud, a photograph by the Southern artist William Christenberry from his aptly-named “Green Warehouse” series? And I must tell you, it was the most beautiful picture of a John Deere green warehouse I have ever seen or ever expect to see: the shapes, the textures. . .

I am, as you know if you have read this far, a writer, a creator with a small “c,” if you will, and I have long felt that we participate powerfully in God’s life when we ourselves are part of the act of creation. When you paint a picture, write a song, deliver a baby into this world, even—those are holy moments, and they are most holy for us because they are set in the physical world, in things we can actually see, hear, touch, love.

What does God do?God creates.And God loves.And being touched by human creation allows us to draw near to

the Source of those things in a way that I still can’t totally explain yet.

Augustine and Aquinas, Jacques Mauritain and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dorothy Sayers and Rowan Williams (and many more, believe me) have written with wisdom and beauty about the true and beautiful. But I think ultimately, there are two things we have to accept to truly believe that God is also moving in human creation.

First, we need an incarnational theology that accepts that God has not only entered into creation in the process of forming and shaping it (and us), but that God thought so highly of the physical world that he was willing to walk through it as a human being, that in that guise he was willing to die for it. To paraphrase (badly) 1500 years of teaching from the Celtic tradition, what Incarnation means is that Matter matters.

Second, we need a sacramental understanding, one that is hard to fi nd in a lot of contemporary Christian settings. Simply put, and moving from my fi rst argument, a sacramental theology accepts that reality is charged with hidden meaning, that the Divine is mediated for us through physical things (as in the sacramental wine and bread), God moving from his realm into ours, and doing it like a breeze on a summer’s day, into the physical through the physical.

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If a U2 song, or a movie like Pulp Fiction, or an episode of “Buffy” can save your life and buoy your soul—and I believe they can, be-cause these things have moved me, touched me as powerfully as my experience in front of the El Greco this afternoon—then we have to accept that God is able to move—that God IS moving—in all of creation where we fi nd the true and beautiful. (And note—sometimes that beautiful isn’t “beautiful”; many of the things that make Ameri-can Beauty so powerful and so true as a story have nothing to do with sentimental Thomas Kinkade notions of beauty.)

But here’s where I’m going to dig a ditch worth dying in: When something is beautifully made, when something is true, then it is good. And where the true, the beautiful, and the good are gathered together, can God be far away?

Beauty, Part the Last

In one of the creation stories we fi nd in Genesis, God looks over the world he has brought into being, our world, and pronounces it good. And so it is, as God is good, and beautiful, as God is beauti-ful, for how could the created object not possess—to some lesser or greater degree—the qualities of the maker? So we, too, are good and beautiful, and made to love the good and beautiful, for we are made by God who is truth and beauty, and whose nature is testifi ed to by the beauty of His creation.

The fi rst section of the Westminster Catechism says that the chief purpose of human beings on this planet is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, and as Norman Maclean, a good Scottish Presby-terian, wrote in A River Runs through It, this beautiful answer has long satisfi ed, as indeed it should. And to do that—to glorify and to enjoy—we worship God, and we mark beauty, and so far as we are capable, we make beauty.

I have been reading Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s remarkable novel about a dying pastor who is writing a series of letters to be left for his young son. The story itself is full of profundity, and the book resounds with the theological themes of repentance, forgive-ness, grace, and love. But perhaps more important than any of those things, in my reading, I was stunned again and again by the sheer beauty of the writing—a phrase polished and turned like a fi ne gem, a conversational exchange that was pitch perfect, an image that reached across boundaries to connect separate worlds.

When I began reading the book, on the plane to New Mexico, I was able to do so only in short bursts. The beauty would build up, and I’d read a sentence that was so perfect that my reaction could only be to close the book, lower it to my lap, and sit in that transcendent experience of beauty.

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And then, after awhile, I would pick it up and read on.Wes Bentley’s character Ricky in American Beauty carries a

camera and fi lms the world around him—the dead and the liv-ing, the mundane and the ordinary. One of his statements in that fi lm—that the world is so full of beauty that sometimes he thinks he’ll just explode—is an expression of this feeling of transcendence that beauty grants us, the meaning we can glean just from our awareness of and openness to it. And that’s what Gilead affi rms as well; toward the end of the novel, John Ames, the novel’s narrator, says,“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them suffi cient.”

And Gilead has become one of those reasons for me. I fi nished the book yesterday beside Upper Turtle Creek, a river-

sized creek in the Texas hill country south of Kerrville, reading this time in huge gulps. I was supposed to be preparing to teach it at a clergy retreat I’m leading this week, and it’s always a good idea to fi nish a book before you have to teach it. This time, since I couldn’t stop to rest, the effect built and built, and I became so overwhelmed that through the last pages, I wept from the sheer beauty of it all, from the cumulative effect of plot, narration, and character.

As I fi nished, the sensation I had was both emotional and spiritual. I had followed a remarkable man, a good man, on his beautifully-rendered fi nal journey.

And I had been brought closer to God because of it.We praise God in all things and at all times. A lovingly-prepared

tuna casserole, light verse written in the margin of a newspaper, a tune whistled tunelessly by a rancher in an ancient Chevy truck—I believe God delights in these things.

But more, knowing how God has manifested and moved in our world, I am encouraged to think that God deserves our best and most beautiful, and that those of us who consciously make art, write songs, tell stories, build, paint, create, are called to offer up works of beauty and strength and reality as the greatest possible gift to each other and to God.

Ah, but what do I mean by beautiful, for there are plenty of religious artists, writers, musicians, et al., producing work very different than what I might like for them to assay. Christian art, at least until very recently, has tended to glorify God, which is a good thing, and to fi lter out the “ugliness” of the physical world seeking a certain idealized kind of beauty. I understand this impulse, although I do not myself share it.

The aforementioned painter Thomas Kinkade seems to have an unlimited supply of beautifully lit cottages, swirling currents, verdant valleys, scenes with no slums, pollution, homeless veter-ans, violence, or emergency rooms in sight. His paintings serve to

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remind us that it is indeed a lovely—an idyllic—world inside the Christian ark. The walls are thick and screen out most of the noise and chaos; the gangway has been pulled up, and inside it’s safe and warm, all Jesus all the time, even in the Christian romance novels and Christian thrash metal.

And all of this is unfair of course, a stereotype that does not honor the sincerity and faith of evangelical artists and writers who simply want to glorify God without having to acknowledge the negative, the diffi cult, or the challenging. But I’m not troubled by their work because I think it’s bad art, although I do think that; I’m troubled by it because it does not encompass all of God’s reality, because in editing out the diffi cult, it ignores the central and simple fact that all of life, good and bad, the rainbow and the dust storm, are part of God’s creation. Augustine wrestled with the fact that so much of the world seemed somehow imperfect; how then could it come from a perfect God? Yet, at the climax of his Confessions, he acknowledges that all is from God, and that nothing God made can be bad.

American Beauty teaches this Augustinian truth in the fi lm’s central image of a windblown trash bag, where we see the beauty and grace underlying our existence even in the literal refuse of that existence. When Wes Bentley’s Ricky describes that whirling, dancing trash bag as the most beautiful thing he has ever fi lmed, it seems at fi rst ridiculous. But we watch, and we feel the power of Ricky’s statement that he knew that day, watching the trash bag, that “there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.”

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, himself both a theo-logian and a poet, says that the job of the artist—perhaps especially the Christian artist—is to convey the whole of creation, to—as in American Beauty—suggest that nothing in this creation is outside the sphere of God’s interest and love. “Doing justice to the physical world,” he writes in Grace and Necessity, “is refl ecting the love of God for it, the fact that this world is worth dying for in God’s eyes.”

All of experience—and all of us in it—are worth representing. Even the weak, the vain, the cruel, the grotesque (even, the man who, as Anne Lamott writes in an essay of the same title, is mean to his dog) are God’s children, as beloved as we are. Their stories and struggles, their pull toward God or fall away are genuine pieces of experience, and must be presented as well as the air-brushed beauty or the simplifi ed experience found inside the walls of the ark.

Flannery O’Connor wrote hard, bleak, even frightening stories about the grace of God breaking into even the hardest, bleakest, most frightening people and places. In her world (as in ours), people die in pain and in fear, characters betray themselves and others, and hard

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questions go unanswered. Yet the universe she depicts is a deeply Christian universe from a devoutly Christian writer, perhaps even more so because she is including the entire spectrum of that universe. As Rowan Williams puts it, “the plausibility of a work of fi ction deal-ing with humanity’s relation to God is inseparable from its refusal to make easy or tidy up the data of a world that is recognizable to anyone not sharing the writer’s [faith] commitments.”

So in O’Connor’s beautiful and diffi cult work, in Gilead, in some of my own fi ction, what makes it Christian art is not the desire to glorify God or to avoid challenging anyone’s beliefs. These are works written to be true, honest, beautiful. They do not claim to have the answers, and they do not shrink from offense, if someone chooses to take it. And that’s the sort of beauty that art should aspire to; theology attempts to answer questions, while art is often mysteri-ous and open-ended.

I can’t say what God likes or doesn’t like. It’s entirely possible that God enjoys Thomas Kinkade’s paintings and Christian metal bands; as (at least) one of Graham Greene’s characters says, I don’t imagine that we can fathom the depths of God’s grace. But I’m throwing my lot in with those who, like O’Connor, like Thomas Merton, like Walker Percy, have said that the responsibility of the Christian artist was fi rst to the work, not to the minds or souls of its viewers, readers, or listeners. The beauty that the Christian artist offers up should not be a work of idealized or sentimentalized beauty, nor should it be a work of dogma disguised as art. It should be, simply, the truest, most authentic work the artist can create. It should shout for joy, weep from fear. It may depict a loving family or a lonely drunk. But because it contains in some greater or lesser sense the essence of its Christian creator, it will be informed by the knowledge of the indwelling of God in creation, the truth that, as Williams writes, “God is possible . . . in the most grotesque and empty and cruel situations.”

In art, as in life, we live in hope. In the work of a great Christian artist who shares with us that hope, we are exposed again to the mysteries of God.

So that’s the challenge, ever and always: to do the work, to do it well, without shortcuts or sellouts, to do it without pandering either to the secular world or to the Christian market, to honor God with work that is challenging and realistic and mysterious—

And beautiful.And when we do that, I believe with all my heart, that God is

there, and that the Spirit can blow through it, bound no one knows where.

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William Foy Coker

LAID BARE

You talked of the long viewfrom your new place with mountainsfi lling the winter-stripped distance—a view sure to foreshorten in the face

of spring’s coming luxuriance.I spoke of my fl esh scraped, sliced, and stapled,and how this grand opening had focused me,as well as my surgeon, inward.

We smiled at the satisfactionan apt metaphor can bring.

But we didn’t touch on howan utterly unknowable God—old tamquam ignoti—ungrasped glory,shed Shechinah to reveal Himself.

After studying the pinned specimenfor anatomical correctness, it’s so easyto swaddle Logos with logy dogma and turnour attention to parsing parables.

We shy from contemplating the fullnessof an empty tomb or the simple offerof water—much less wine and bread.We avert our eyes to keep from seeing

His face in every gardener, hiker,kibitzer, or fry-cook under the sun.

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William Foy Coker

RELIEF

The moon glared like a streetlightfrom that corner of sky where hickoryand oak converge on the pond’s south shore.

Among squandered stars we foundboth dippers, moonwashed, but brighterthan where they scoop sky over Omaha.

We shared Grandma’s quilt and some dreams,perhaps, until you nudged me, askingwhere to relieve yourself and was it safe.Safe? With poison ivy, mosquitoes,

and a black bear that chewed a camper’s shoulderwhile he played possum in his sleeping bagover by Cass? Sure, my son, it’s safe—as safe as it gets.

Then you were back, shaking mewith vastness in your voice:“You’ve gotta see, Dad. It’s likeit’s got milk poured out all over it.”

And you were right.The moon had passed on,leaving a legacy of lesser lightssharp against the deeper darkness,

and the Milky Way—not carelessly sloshedfrom some celestial banqueting table—but poured across the heavensby a hand even more deliberate

than the one guiding the plane silently,steadily fl ashing above the horizonand echoed over the pondby fl ashes of fi refl ies.

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Angela O’Donnell

ST. BENEDICT’S FEASTCamaldoli Monastery, Big SurJuly 11, 2007

Christ called so loud, we left the lonely roadthat rimmed the earth along the singing sea,a gentle summons from a gentle Friend,sweet promise of God’s hospitality.The monks were gathered on the mountain top,the table set, their vespers just begun,two spaces open on the altar steps.The echo of the single church bell rung.

Here each man chanted his best hopes aloudlike sane men singing to a world gone mad,and our two voices joined the joyful choirin that strange place lit by ordinary fi re.We blessed and we broke. We spoke the ancient code.We left the mountain. Bread and blood for the road.

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Angela O’Donnell

CHRIST’S COLORSUpon Passover & Holy Thursday Falling on the Same Day

Yellow, green as risen grass, dandelion spike,forsythia whip, the hue of Judasat table, cross-legged, urgentto run, to kiss,

to quiet the riotin his jaundiced heart—shade of the silken sashwound about Mary’s head, the lemon she usedto rinse her hair,long as a hemp rope,thick as a strip of hide.

Pale pink of hyacinth,small girls’ coats,church hats,Easter’s eager daughters.

Sudden scarlet staining the lintelsparing the luckyson inside.

And royal purple, Color of Kings,draped upon Goddark as irony.

Christ’s words amid the ink-black fact,sweet redblood in our mouths.

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Angela O’Donnell

ST. THOMAS “All that I have written seems to me like so much straw.” —St. Thomas Aquinas, December 6, 1273

Feast of St. Nicholas Mid-day mass in the old stone church,the host hoisted high in my hands,when winter light pierces my heart.

Confl agration an enddevoutly to be wished.I watch as my decades of pages

catch fi re in the late day light,warming the chill of this cold chapel.

I watch the black letters,licked by the fl ames,consumed in a glory of orange,

the blue light leap from each live leaf,like straw strewn on the stable fl oortouched by the match of Christ.

How could they not dance like David,the wild wind of Spirit

fanning those fl amesof my large and little love?You have set me on fi re,

O my Lord, at the last,after years of scut and cold smolder.And I can not stop burning.

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Alan Berecka

MEDITATION ON EPHESIANS 5:2To the Creator of fragranceand of odor, is there a difference

found in the spray of fl attened skunksand or in ocean waves,

in the smell of swinemanure, or in the air deep among the pines,

in garlic or mint on the breath,in the blossom of lilacsor in the reek of death,

or are all redeemed by His Son’s scentdistilled in Christ’s fragrant sacrament?

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Alan Berecka

MEANING

It’s only the second time in history we’ve had snow on Christmas, and it’s the most in a 24-hour period. The last time was in 1918. —Larry Maifeld, National Weather Service Corpus Christi Caller Times, 12/26/2004

Christmas Eve mass—my kids serving,my wife reading.Barely Catholic,I sit alone nextto the side exit,on my mark, waitingfor the fi nal blessing.

Amen. I race.First to the door,a half-step out.Snow. Snowfalling, dancing, refl ecting lights,fi lling the night,coating cars, palmtrees, everything.

It’s snowing,I let slip.The guy two stepsback laughs.I hold the door,then walk on.He says,It’s snowing.The guy behindhim laughs. . . .

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One by one,the church emptiesout into belief.I stand grinning. Joined by my family,we watchas miracleupon miraclesilently piles up.

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Alan Berecka

THE RELIC

After my mother took ill, my fathersought miracles. He bought large votivesthat burnt each Sunday at the feetof the patron saint of last resorts. Each July, he and I made the Saint Jude novena that our less-than-rich Lithuanian parish offered with the intention of remaining solvent. The priest who needed help hoped that I would be there to serve. If only all prayers could be answered so easily.

After mass and a short prayer service,the faithful and affl icted left their pews.Some marched, while others limpedor shuffl ed, or were rolled toward us—the priest holding the encased relic and me holding a small piece of linen.I tried not to stare at them—the deformed, the goitered, the palsied, the blind, the droolers—as they paraded to the open altar gates to kiss the relic’s glass from which, with an unsteady hand, I erased their lipstick and spit.

After her brain surgery, my motherstayed in bed. Bald and bandaged, she moaned low when not sleeping.Aunt Helen, our family’s religiousfanatic, dropped by the house on her wayback from Maryland and the shrineof the newly canonized Mother Seton. Helen glowed as she handed my mother a small jewelry box. I expected to see yet another medal or rosary to add to the dozens my mother wore or thumbed. She lifted the lid.Her face fell into a blank stare. She thanked Helen, handed me the gift, then slid down her pillow and into a feigned sleep.After my aunt left, I reopened the case.

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Under a certifi cate of authentication, I found a glass ball that held a dollop of paste on which sat an affi xed chip of bleached bone. I found myself thanking God for making me a whole sinner and not a future and scattered Saint.

My mother died of an aggressive cancer that ate her spine. Even when pumped morphine did not touch her pain, she continued to pray, a rosary twisted in her hand. After her funeral, I left the Church and her capricious God.

I believed I would never return. When our daughter reached fi rst communion age, my wife, a Baptist, reminded me of the cost we had agreed to pay for our wedding in my then Church, a promise to raise our children as Catholics. Thinkingback on my childhood, I decided my childshould have a chance to believe, so I foundmyself begrudgingly attending Sunday Mass.Then one week while going through the motions,I found myself asking, If my mother neverlost her faith, what right did I have to blame her suffering for the death of my belief?At that moment, I felt a small piece of faith affi x itself, and I began to pray that the glue might last.

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Chet Corey

BY STAINED-GLASS LIGHT

Own it, as though you would sorrow—this joyinbreaking like bread of Eucharist held up between the newly consecrated hands of a priest, then broken into leaden light, the stained-glass fi gure of Christ crucifi ednailed by shards of red, his umber, drawn face

downcast toward Mary’s upturned, violet face,the focal point between your unvoiced joythat you were not one who had him crucifi edand Mary’s hand, which is your own held up,triangulated in undeniable lightthat Yes! Christ was sacrifi ced at no other hands

but ours—that you as well have bloody hands.And so it is that you turn your fetid faceupwards with hers, bathed in love’s violet light.How Mary anticipates resurrection joy!How her posture enunciates with hands held up ready to receive her Christ-Child crucifi ed

as Michelangelo sculpted him—not crucifi ed,not broken Eucharist between a priest’s hands, but whole as Mary bore him—by her held up,swaddled that we may see adulthood’s faceand in a mother’s care for her child our joythat we are loved so long as Christ be our light.

That if you take up your cross, follow that light into your darkest night, by doubt crucifi ed,you will fi nd within her arms comfort and joy.With trembling Thomas, reach out, touch handsthat Christ take yours within his to trace his facewith fumbling, as one already old held up

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by walking cane, or by another’s arm held up,that you might walk this aisle toward altar light,take on with bread of Eucharist his face,his body your body—Christ crucifi edthat he might take your hands within his handsto fumblingly feel along smile lines his joy!

O cantilevered joy, fractioned bread held upwithin our hands to glory fi red light,we crucifi ed you, with Judas kissed your face.

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John Jenkinson

THE CHRISTIAN POEM

Is a poem by a Christian A Christian poem? Sans Jesus?If it simply shucks peas, seducesA girl, or shoots pool on worn baize?

Does the ghost of the holy Reside in our base quotidianBlindness, the banal crucifi xionsReserved for the world’s next victims?

Is the song of a pagan A Christian song, quaveringAs Christ opens his red fl eshIn the intimate ravish of suffering?

If a beast prays a poem, Does Christ reappear in the straw?In a barnyard’s scattered scat? Does a donkey bray in awe?

Does a Christian poem keep Both scabbed knees on the ground,Swathed in the frankincense Of its own well-meaning sound?

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John Jenkinson

MATESFor Lisa and Terry Moser

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood. —Macbeth (Macbeth 3.4.123)

In the adjoining room my husband playsA game of chess with our iron-fi sted son.With each capture, they rake the medical silenceWhile I wait, curled into a questionMark, a pawn for whom the hands of kingsSeem little enough to ask. Two spaces, one move.

In the recovery room, of course, one movesLittle; down the hall a mother playsThe feeding game with her new-born king.A father shows his father a fresh son,They both agree to lay aside a questionOf culpability, and gaze in silence

At their several pounds of fl esh. SilenceGrips my heart as well. I force a moveBeyond the nagging itch of every questionIn my blood and call the nurse to pleaseCross the room where my husband and sonSit sporting with their boxwood knights and kings;

I pray the common motherhood of askingFor my mottled daughter, wrapped in that silenceOf the premature, but the brightest sunIn my small universe. The good nurse movesHer heart to mine. After the bloody play,Lady Zoe lived. It’s not a question

Of justice or miscarriage, but the E.R. doctor’s questionWhen her heart’s sonogram fl ickered like a king’sLost gore, then caught fi re in the playOf small lights, echoed in the silenceAs my own obstetrician slowly movedHis head in assent, in quiet orison.

I drowse while my son mates his father’s king.No one questions my daughter’s steamy silence,Or, with each slow move, our love’s display.

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Michael H. Lythgoe

COLLAGE(for Helen)

Bits of beauty everywhere… —Leonard Cohen

Begin in Belton, Texas, with a blank, a plain white canvas.Someone sees the material stretched over a frameAs the cloth covering chuck wagons feeding wranglersPecos strawberries along the Chisholm Trail to Abilene;Modernists saw the canvas wrapping a body carriedHigh in cries through Gaza, Palestine, the Holy Land.Cover the canvas we are told. I paint a white surfaceWith a white sealer. It dries clear. I pull in blue,Red, yellow. Blue—heavy and dark—is spreadFrom NW to SE quadrants. Pure red is added,Mixed, smeared, until a view of dusk emerges, Darkening to midnight. A wing of yellow—Like a fl ame is thick impasto. A trail of bloodDrips, is layered, conveys an open wound.I insert an adobe church, a B&W of a weathered nun,An Apache with black hair long as a horse’s mane;A Winchester rifl e aligns with the right border.Fragments of paper add texture, printed words,Lines from a poem, fi re and forge, wounds…Someone puts a window in their creation; another artistCreates an icon with gold leaf—resembles a Klimt,Another work shows faces fl oating as in a fi sh tank.Big words stuck in center: renewal by fi re. The yellow burns—like a prairie fi re. Fire cauterizes, Closes a wound. I think of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Blue Alert.”

Firefl ies burning everywhere;Shrapnel sailing in sandy air.Warriors hit the dirt;The base is on alert.Talk of religion—no one listens.The base is on alert;Non-believers won’t convert.Glittering gold leaf ironed

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On the surface—over the Apache With long black hair,Prayer and prairie fi re—

Sunrise seems everlasting.

Forge burns impuritiesFrom a hammered blade.

My impure page requires more fi re.

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Michael H. Lythgoe

LEAVING KILLEEN ON AN EAGLE(for Audell)

Soldiers of the 1st Cavalry come and goWearing uniforms for a desert—Sand-shades, dunes and stones.Duffel bags come and go.

With soldiers and their wivesI rise on a night of the new moonVeiled behind a scrim of rain.Off the port wing on the earth below

It seems constellations have fallenAs we fl y higher. Burning coalsSpilled across the dark horizon markThe end of the world; glitter trails glow.

I have fl own over the worldOn the eve of the EpiphanyLeaving a scene of three panels painted:A triptych rendered sage brush, desert,

Red rocks—a landscape of mesa and mystery. I refl ect on the vision;A voice gives up a line before paintings.Poets, storytellers and singers

Lived inside the art of the landscapeA moment or two sharing gifts—A word, an image before a mesa—Offered as on an altar.

One voice came as a prophetTo tell of lunar-like White Sands; anotherSpoke of apricots melting in his hands;One played hide and seek on horseback.

I imagined seeing holy icons,I heard chants—a litany of elegiesI glimpsed a mountain holy in my mind,Landed on earth, found the Magi’s star fallen.

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Michael H. Lythgoe

JOYFUL MYSTERY

We come together to make a joyful noise.Sunday. No church. A school auditorium.Look. Behind the altar on stage—a curtainParts. Behind the curtain a fi gure swaysIn slow adagio: mere refl ection in a mirror.We listen for a joyful noise. Yet the chorus stays silent. A fi gure Stands off stage, in shadow wearingBlack trousers, a purple coat, AndeanFelt hat—black—face but a shadow. AroundThe mysterious neck—a scarf with sparkles.

The swaying fi gure’s rhythmic movesReveal a life-sized marionette hung thereAt Mass, image cast in glass, a costumeReady in regal purple to walk out on stage—Deceiving, a lifeless, make-believe fi gure.We are fooled by what we see: legerdemain:A large doll hanging, an illusion, named.

These are empty times. We grow anxious.Anxiety thrives listening for joyful noise.We seek what we cannot see.Meaning is often lost in a dark glass.Trickery is everywhere. Joy is hard to hear. If fear is what we feel, or uncertainty,Look for the purple-coated fi gure,The face of a shadow dancing—Swaying ever so smoothly on strings.

Still, we come to pray without a church,To kneel, imagining sounds we can callJoyful. Sometimes what we do not knowWe simply label spiritual.Soon the choir will sing Joy to the World. But joy these days is not of this world.Nor is the fi gure in regal purple real.Still, the swaying fi gure seems willingTo step from a mirror and play a role,To sing alive a deadened soul.

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Ted Barnes

My work is devoted to searching for “Truth” in the midst of mystery and paradox. In essence, my work is about exploring con-tradiction; an investigation into intuition and logic, emotion and reason, faith and knowledge, religion and science, myth and reality, and abstraction and representation. Even though the imagery of my work doesn’t usually seem spiritually inspired at fi rst glance, its intent is to address and examine the issues involved in the re-lationship between my Southern heritage and personal faith, and the puzzle this seems to encounter. I am also interested in formal concerns about contemporary painting/drawing, and I explicitly and deliberately use popular cultural images as an inherent part of my research and artistic expression.

My most recent imagery has been based on a re-investigation into the ideas and concepts of modern abstraction as sources for composition and content. These images combining reality and abstraction are used metaphorically as an investigation about the paradoxical nature of man and his relationship with God. It unfolds as loose interpretations about personal experiences concerning life in general and explores the difference and similarities between emotion and reason, pride and disappointment, understanding and misunderstanding, etc. I see this work as the complexity of under-standing versus the reality of the situation. I think a lot of my work has to do with a sense of understanding myself and is intended to further explore my spiritual search for “Truth.”

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Personal Problems

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Double W

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Flight to Mars

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Unknown

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Romance

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Mosquitoe Killer

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Jerusalem

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Mark E. Harden

TAPS AT ARLINGTON

as the fi nal note waifs awayand the wind dies down,there is yet one last solemn moment,suspended

and our memory of the fallenbecomes a brushthat sweeps away our grief,so we may see them once more,before they fade forever into the evening mist

before some sound stirs this fi eld to fl ight—still we might remember—”as we go, this we know, God is near”

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D.S. Martin

PIANO LESSON

If you hit the right keys at the right time the instrument plays itself

J.S. Bach once said which I fi nd true Every time I play the Goldberg Variations

on the stereo Glenn Gould’s piano plays fl awlessly

A good pianist makes her mistakes in practice not altering mid-phrase

as the groomsmen gather at the altar nor as an impediment to the soloist

preparing to sing It’s a matter of timing The surprise with pianos is there are no wrong keysC.S. Lewis has noted Every single note is rightat one time & wrong at another

When I took lessons I admit I struck good keys badly untimely a pedestrian standing at a green light wearing sandals in the snow

There are 360 possible degrees to lean away from perpendicular eighty-seven keys other than the right one although a jazz

musician might fi nd an alternative if the timing’s right

But if your timing is as off as a photographer’swho falls in love with the bride or one who opens the shutterwhen the bridesmaids turn aside it’s not a good picture

Good is not good when it goes off course a luxury linercolliding with an iceberg a dissonant note in a major chordor the marriage of true minds with selfi sh hearts We all know good may go bad lilies can festerat the front of the church the pianist’s cell phone might chirrup as the couple strains for I do

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D.S. Martin THE POSSIBILITIES

What did the Professor mean by Nothing is more probablewhen asked of possible other worldseverywhere just around the corner?

I know how unobservant I can beof what I should be able to seenever mind the microscopic the subatomicthe spiritual the possibilitiesfrom unimagined dimensionscolours lost in shifting lightshapes obscured by descending darknessrising fog a closing doorMight the end of time revealall existence as simultaneously realfrom the history of each place?I’m a squid on the ocean fl oorunaware of the watera willow dancing on a creekbankunconscious of the wind

A small girl tumbles through a wardrobeinto a wood fi lled with unbelievable trutha parallel world She has proven herselfreliable Why should we not believe her?

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Albert Haley

IN PRAISE OF TOASTMatthew 7:9

I promised that I would say a word on behalf of morning toast. Freshfrom the electric toastertoast.

They asked me how it occurred to me to mention, of allthings, toast.

I said toast is more important than one might think. I saidit might be a miracle.

It seemed to me that over timewe allowed ourselves to forgetthe seeds in the pregnant bellyof the earth. We drove past the grain waving golden fl ags in the fi eld without giving notice or salute.

We ceased visiting the great grindingwheels, and where were weat the moment of entry of water and the emergence of pasty gluten?The assertions of yeast, the stiff-armedpaddles kneading in the vats,and the blazing day of oven fl ames?

Now it’s all here warming my hand during a lazy intermezzo in my kitchen.

Ready for the welcome glob of honey or a dab of jam, too. Seconds awayfrom a meeting of teeth, the tongue’sswallowing. Each yielding bite evokingmuch more than itself, more than I can be.

Heavenly.

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Brady Peterson

ONIONS

We park our cars on the grassand walk in clumps toward the canopyset up on the edge of the cemetery. Summer thunderstorms are gatheringin the distance. We hope for rain,sweat beading on our foreheads and bleedingthrough the blue fabric of our cotton shirts.We pause for a few last incantations, hands folded, heads bowed.

Years ago, not far from this mark,on a bend in the Lampasas river, you and I would plunge into the coldgreen water and come up grinning,your brown skin glistening in the sun.You were the one who made meeat onions so you could eat them too.If you want to kiss me, you teased,offering me a slice of the sour fruit.

And now I am standingin my one good suit just outsidethe shade of a tent, looking in.

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Brady Peterson

STILL LIFE

What would he sayif God walked into the room?

Why did my daughterdie? And why do I haveto face the sun every

morning in her absence?He looks up halfexpecting the door

to open. That momentbefore the roomsettles into a convergence

of light and space.On a table rests a bowlof apples.

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Daniel Polikoff

ST. PENNANT MELANGELLnear LLangyrog

Bodily without spiritual love is fi re without wood, and consumes itself entire; while spiritual without bodily love is forest without fl ame. It provideth food, shade, and shelter, and, in season, may blaze in glorious confl agration, destroying and renewing the world. —St. Melangell

Ivy scripts the stone circling the church yard.Elephant-thick, the yew tree guarding the gatedates from the death of Jesus. A brood of swallows nests in the chapel eaves. Inside, stone walls are chiseled with hares. Near the reliquary, a tablet tells the story of the saint.

St. MelangellThe daughter of an Irish King, Melangellfl ed unwanted wedlock. The maid sought refugein this hidden vale, and lived alonein purity and devotion. Once, a Prince hunting hares, raised and chased one hitherwith his hounds. The helpless creature hidbeneath Melangell’s skirts who did not stirfrom prayer. Hot with scent, the baying houndshalted when they saw her, and quietedon the edge of the clearing. High on his horsethe Prince rode up. He urged his strange dogs onwith brazen shouting. These merely whimpered, and fl ed,knowing a higher master. The man came down, and asked Melangell’s purpose there. Contemplating,she answered not, until the hare appeared, and—as if struck—the Prince himself perceived it,speaking thus: “Ah, small friend, your nimble senseruns ever ahead of mine; yet now I see good refuge gained, and faithfully shall follow.This sward, this vale, I pronounce it herswith all the land around: no hare, nor hartbe hunted here, til my Lord’s kingdom’s found.

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Here, stone cryptscenturies of silence. The pilgrim’s peaceis broken only by the sighingof the ancient yew.

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William Kelley Woolfi tt BAKING LESSONSCharles de Foucauld: El Golea, Algeria, 1906

While two sisters lace my sandals and boil my robes,two more teach me to mix and bake Eucharist hosts. Practicing alone, I toss the fl our, and oh! Visions of manna, pools of milk, myrtle blossoms, lambs, moons, a winter of feathers instead of snow. Coins of water rain from my fi ngers into the bowl; my hands change like clouds, make weather, clap for thunder. I shall know no other gods before I take You from the oven. Time leaks like a slit grain-sack. My body cannot hold me; I dance while I wait. Sweat slides down and slickens my legs. I sprout wings, and fl oat on the smell of new bread, the smoke that stabs my eyes, swells and rolls in the kitchen. I rescue the smoldering pan. Your body hides in smoke-veiled chunks of coal.

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William Kelley Woolfi tt SAND MITE ROSARYCharles de Foucauld: 1912, Tamanrasset, Hoggar, Algeria

A day like a thousand years, a thousand years like the rosary of olive pits that my Tuareg friends pray— God I love you on the little pit God I love you above all on the bigger pit—prayer like breath, the circle without end, breaths in a day like the number of days before tomorrow’s priest brings the Tuareg to Christ, the number of breaths and days like the raindrops that follow the drought, and that number like the aphids too—fi rst our brittle sheaves of millet sing to the rain, burst into leaves, a great green fi rethat the aphids then turn to stubble and lace—the aphids the littlest of creatures, like the sand mites whose holy work is to nibble clean the olive pits that I bury in the sand. I wait twelve days, I dig up the pits, I wash them, I dry them in the shade. I wait twelve more days, then I pierce the pits with needle and string.

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Barbara Crooker

ANGELS

A seagull scythed the leaden sky:bone-white, foam white, the wings so sharpI looked for the hole, the slice they’d cut,exposing what might be beyond the clouds,some Renaissance-glorious dream of heaven?

But nothing appeared, no fl ash of whiterobes, no haloes’ sparking glow, no harps,nothing but sheet metal: pewter sea, the scutof clouds, just Thomas Hardy’s neutral tones. Loudcries of gulls: mine, mine, grabbing what’s forbidden.

When a woman shuffl es day-old bread, throws it highso some can catch it on the wing, others carpfi ercely about what they’ve missed, puttheir razor beaks close to her eyes, and crowdout the weakest of the fl ock. She’s seventy

if she’s a day, old coat, ragged scarf, tiny.Not someone you’d ever notice, just a sharp-beaked sparrow, ordinary, plain. She’s here daily, outin every kind of weather: spitting rain, threatening clouds,distant thunder, or like today, the thin sun

streaming down, pouring shafts of lightthat look as solid as threads, warpand woof from some great loom. Putaway your this-can’t-be-possible thoughts, your doubts,see the feathers fl are from her back. This glimpse we’re given.

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Barbara Crooker

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY TWENTY-THIRD PSALM

The Lord is my GPS, I shall not want. He maketh me to drive the highways

and backroads in their proper order. He restoreth my direction.He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness, the correct exits, the most direct routes. Yea, though I drive on the turnpike, surrounded by SUVs and semis, I shall know no fear; thy

coordinates and reference points, they comfort me. Thou preparest a true

course before me, in the presence of all traffi c; I shall not take detours.Surely making good time on the road shall follow me all the days

of my life, and I will arrive at my fi nal destination at the appointed hour.

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John H. Timmerman

ANATOMY OF A CEMETERY

The 1946 turtle-back Ford ground up the big hills in second gear, the transmission weeping in protest. We three kids in the back seat turned and looked out the back window, studying the long incline and wondering if, at some point, the rasping engine would give up and start coasting backward. We held our breath at the crest of the hill and whooped when Dad put it in neutral and roared down the other side.

Our summer journeys through the lower peninsula of Michigan were quixotic and memorable. It was understood that we would not travel out of state. If our only affordable transportation broke down somewhere, we would only be a couple of hundred miles from home. So we zigzagged across the state on two-lane highways as crooked as Quasimodo. Most of these roads had slipped into relaxed derelic-tion, but nearly every one led to some adventure.

My mother, an eccentric and vivacious woman, who had learned to manufacture fun on her own terms while growing up as one of three daughters of a widow during the Great Depression, served as navigator. The state map was merely a suggestion; whimsy was her guide. If some gravel farm road tugged her imagination, we turned up it. When we came across a small farm town, we stopped for gas, and then ate our home-packed sandwiches in the shade of a tree. As we pulled slowly out of the town, invariably we came across the county cemetery. Wherever two or three are gathered, after all, they need a place to bury their dead.

They all looked pretty much the same. Sometimes the stones were so worn the engraving was impossible to decipher. Stones leaned into the ground at awkward angles, moved about by frost heave and sinking as if some huge earthworm, probably feeding on the dead scattered below, had bulged and shoved against the stones. The headstones in these country yards were invariably small, as if marking a necessary thing and no more. In country graveyards, death is the fact. Nor do I remember any fancy inscriptions—ironic, tender, humorous, or sad. These tended toward names and dates. Perhaps one or two words were added. On the stone of an infant: Sweetheart. On a slightly larger chunk of granite: Beloved Wife. I remember that one because the dates were 1900–1916. Somehow, even at my own young age, I wanted to excavate that story. Beloved wife, yet she died at sixteen. How long had she been married, this Gertrude Williams? How old was her husband? I could fi nd no accom-panying stone. What did she die of at the young age of sixteen?

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Quite often, my highly-inventive mother, who generally tended to change a story each time she told it, added liberally to the sparse facts to enhance the drama. She might see me at Gertrude Williams’ grave and say, “Oh, my. Isn’t that sad. Of course, a lot of girls married young then. No money, no opportunity. And they worked themselves to death. Their husbands had them working on the farm like a hired hand, then they caught whooping cough or diphtheria or something and died. Those were hard times for women.” I accepted the history, even though I had seen Gertrude Williams altogether differently.

* * *Now I am with my eight-year-old daughter, who, in the third

grade, has been given the assignment of doing a crayon etching of the face of any gravestone over a hundred years old. The oldest public cemetery in the city is now surrounded by dilapidated homes, party stores, and barbecue joints that perfume the air with the scent of smoking ribs.

“Dad,” she asks me, “What does a hundred years mean?”I’m quiet, pondering so huge a question. Is it God’s blink of an

eye, or just some human measurement for a lot of time as we know it?

“I mean,” she says, “is it from when the person is born or when he died?”

Ah yes. The practical question. “Well,” I tell her, “I’m sure we won’t have any trouble fi nding a stone over a hundred years old from when the person died. This cemetery was started when this area was just fi elds.”

She looks out the window. “Really, Dad?”“Really.”I let her fi nd her stone. There are dozens to choose from. She

passes by those who died full of years. With a shock I realize that she has selected one, and now is bent to it, carefully taping up her paper for the etching, of a girl who died at the age of eight. One hundred and three years ago.

* * *Today my wife and I ride our bikes six miles as we do every

morning. A good mile of it is through a cemetery. We go slowly there. In the early morning on hot summer days, a cool mustiness exudes from the towering trees and the well kept lawn. We ride slowly on that stretch to enjoy the way the morning sun stretches through the trees and lays shafts of light on stones and grass. Slowly enough to study the stones along the macadam road. Here a white styrofoam cross with plastic fl owers lies broken before a stone. There a whole garden of lavender petunias frolics around the polished granite. Ge-raniums seem to be the fl owers of choice, often highlighted by white begonias. Of course, there is an area also where all the fl owers are

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plastic, some draped around statuary of the Virgin Mary.As much as one studies cemeteries, whether to shape a history

or to refl ect on the signifi cance of life and death, the ironic nature of a cemetery is story. Our own story.

Since those childhood excursions across Michigan, I have held on to that puzzlement about cemeteries. I pause, perhaps, before that stone with the small fl ag marker and begin to reappraise the stories of war. I have seen cemeteries with weathered wooden crosses, some merely with a name and no date. I have walked cemeteries from such sprawling acreage as the raised graves of New Orleans to tiny patches outside Appalachian coal towns. Under each stone is a story, worth nothing to us, perhaps, until we begin to tell it to ourselves in the most personal ways possible. Most importantly, perhaps, we story to ourselves the meaning of grief and death.

* * *Generally we go to cemeteries only when we need to. The cem-

etery solves a problem for us. It is a disposal unit. One may opt for the less expensive alternative of a cremation, but one cannot, after all, put the corpse on ice or plant it in the garden or like Faulkner’s Miss Emily sprinkle lime around her cobwebbed lover. Thus cem-eteries become valuable pieces of real estate. In the medium size community I live in, holding slightly over a million people in the metropolitan area, the average cost of a burial lot in a public cem-etery is $750. In the portion of the cemetery where the grass won’t grow and traffi c roars by on the fi ve-lane thoroughfare, one can buy a lot for $400. In a public cemetery most plots are tucked in side by side like one long line of sleepers in an Army barracks. Private cemeteries can set prices at their pleasure. They water the lawns and use gas-powered trimmers around the gravestones.

The very word cemetery evokes both personal memory and also a deep tribal subconscious. In the Garden of Eden, Satan broached the primal lie to Eve: “You will not surely die” (Gen. 3.4). And so we too fall into the myth of what Ernst Becker called the Denial of Death. Death is, for the modern sensibility, uncouth and untimely. I mean our death, in the most personal and ultimate terms. We want to cling to the only life we’ve ever known, the only one our minds are equipped to imagine. Or else we want to get rid of it quickly, painlessly, sloughing off this mortal coil in one quick twist. Dying is the thing we abhor.

It is different with the death of others, of course. Here we dredge another term out of the etymological past and use tragedy. Many deaths are tragic of course, from the stillborn child, the hor-rifi c auto accident, the war dead, the inexplicable suicide. Tragedy, from the Greek tragos aoidē, is indeed a goat song, that time when all life seems meaningless and foul. Except in certain cases when

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life itself seems a tragedy; for example, the elderly parent so sunk into dementia that he or she no longer recognizes the daughter who visits. Death is the cruel jokester, the dark checkerboard where a malignant, crooked talon moves the pieces.

Cemetery is the antidote to the cruel jest. We speak of “laying someone to rest,” the literal meaning of the word. Like a drum-beat, the word snakes down its etymological pole to the Greek root koimētērion, from the verb koimān—to put to sleep. Writing of his friend Hallam in In Memoriam, Tennyson says, “God’s fi nger touch’d him, and he slept” (85.20). And William Cullen Bryant, searching for some answers for the problem of suffering apart from traditionally received historical and religious patterns, took refuge in “Thanatop-sis” in the great sleeper’s couch of earth:

Yet not to thine eternal resting-placeShalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wishCouch more magnifi cent. Thou shalt lie downWith patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, All in one mighty sepulchre. (31-37)

Bryant’s effort to be of good cheer, however, is cheerfully muddled. At another moment in the poem he talks about the hu-man dead as little more than good compost. Nonetheless, the very comfort he derives from that lies in the universality of death. Live courageously, he writes, then

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couchAbout him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. (79-81)

Very likely Bryant provides the most succinct defi nition of cem-etery—land of the sleepers. It is helpful to think of cemeteries in terms such as those used by Tennyson or Bryant. How else do we think of those bodies below the surface, carefully encapsulated in their concrete vaults to delay the inevitable decay that creeps in through the gaps? We, many of us, arrange new myths. Here too I use the word in its Greek etymology—mythos, the telling of stories to explain mysteries. The stories may in fact be true; that’s why we cling to them fi ercely.

These are stories not of the body, as Bryant has it, but of the soul. For some, the stories are named Resurrection, that indeterminate point when the new body joins the soul that already lives in some eternal paradise. Or punishment. “Death be not proud,” wrote John Donne, simply because death’s language does not have the last word in the divine drama. Others have their own stories. Ralph Emerson, mimicking Plato, spoke of the Kosmos to which all our souls ascend. Many have adopted the concept of Nirvana, which has two meanings:

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a state of perfect rest and the attainment of wisdom. Interestingly, the Sanskrit form of the word, nirvānam, literally means “a blow-ing out” or extinction. Some hold to this literally, seeing the gentle thud of the casket in the earth as the end of it all—ashes to ashes to annihilation.

Surely one’s view of the cemetery is tinctured by one’s view of death. The fact can’t be avoided. Perhaps another view, one I call repose, is helpful here. I am thinking of those like me, who for no particular purpose perhaps, fi nd themselves entering a cemetery, lingering there while shadows fall all around, breathing the air that is slightly musty, smelling of earth and damp and fl owers, and so wander into a state of repose. Unanticipated perhaps, like Emily Dickinson’s certain slant of light on winter afternoons. For her, it was a source of “heavenly hurt;” for me, it is a sense of quietude, much longed for and seldom located in daily life. In Bird by Bird, a book as much about living as it is about writing, Anne Lamott observes that “Sophisticated innocence is a gift. It is yours to give away. We are wired as humans to be open to the world instead of enclosed in a fortifi ed, defensive mentality” (206). That “sophisticated innocence” extends to that other world of death, against which we seem daily to be fortifying our defenses.

In the cemetery I can turn inward without embarrassment, even play out my own private jokes. I wonder, for example, about the signifi cance of size among the gravestones. Do the very large stones think to themselves, “Under me lies someone important?” Or are they cynical—“If only you knew.” Are they proud of their engraved names that can be read a block away? Do the little stones get jealous of their larger brothers who toss their thick shoulders defi antly heavenward? How about that crooked little stone, half sunk into the earth with one chipped, pink edge showing. It reminds me of myself, sometimes wanting to hide from the mental goliaths all around, afraid that my chipped edges of broken words will only be laughed at.

To be in repose works two ways. Like a fork in a northwoods Michigan road, one almost has to travel both paths concomitantly in a spiritual schizophrenia that might just lead to human wholeness. It is the enigma of the cemetery. Repose derives from the Latin pausese, to rest or to pause. Indeed, the cemetery is the “resting place” of the dead. Consequently, it is not the macabre horror ground of our child-hood nightmares where dead bodies leak out of the ground like so many neurotic nightcrawlers. As children we wondered how people could build houses along the lot line of a cemetery, or, worse, leave their windows open at night. As adults we know that the mortal remains of countless humans are “at rest.” They don’t move, they don’t think, no nervous twitches awaken them in the slumber that

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is absence of life. To be at repose in our living sense is an active state, often hard

won. The cemetery serves as a functional aid for this activity, not unlike the action of entering a yoga position to turn inward or kneel-ing at the bench in a monastery. What is the aim, the telos, of such active repose? Confronting one’s grief in the universalized sense is among them. It may not be grief for an individual, but for the fact that we live in a grieving world. Without romanticizing causes and effects, it is safe to say that most of us experience the inward groaning of our race. It may very well focus on that one festering sore that consumes us; it may well be that something is simply out of whack in the human experience, that we are riding on a planet with a tilted axis that wobbles on the brink of destruction.

In his masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Melville probes what he called the “mystery of iniquity.” The focal point is the vil-lainous character Claggart, whose moral sensibility has been twisted and perverted beyond recognition. At a loss to explain Claggart’s intrinsic malevolence, Melville adapts Plato’s concept of “a depravity according to nature.” For Plato, evil occurs when something goes awry in the mixture of Ideal Form and mortal nature at birth. Some are born monsters by a defect at birth, the same way one might be born with six fi ngers or four toes. Evil happens. The mystery, insists Melville, lies in the fact that such perversions have the capacity of appearing perfectly normal: “These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort” (60). Unsatisfi ed with the Platonic suggestion of individual perversion, the western philosophical and theological tradition has grappled with alternatives, from the Augustinian concept that all life is twisted as a consequence of the Edenic Fall to contemporary environmental determinists who believe that, if we can only rectify the context that contributes to wrong, we can eradicate evil itself. We can set aside, perhaps, the blithe insistence of Emerson that there is no evil—even when his own life was battered by tragedy—or what he called Fate, a gentler term by far.

A cemetery is a repository of grief; it lingers almost tangibly in the stubby fi ngers of the pine trees and the long thick arms of oak and maple. We go there to confront, and say farewell to, our personal griefs. The cemetery, moreover, wears the habitude of quiet that turns us inward—the fi rst step toward ordering the random, clank-ing chains of discontent that rattle like bones in our hearts.

Few want to confront their griefs and fears. As Flannery O’Connor observed, we attempt to domesticate them, burying them under “manners”—the rituals that encompass the day. If one result of the activity of repose is the opportunity to encounter our griefs, the second is healing. This too is a much abused word in our time. We want to buy healing in a pill, vial, or experience, but it doesn’t quite

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work that way. Because healing is a process, it eschews the quick fi xes we impose and takes a steady, and often unnerving, length of time. We imagine healing as something to be done upon us, while we are passive but impatient. Perhaps the right herbal bouquet or therapist can quicken the process, but it is not to be, even in our lives of little urgencies.

If confrontation is the hard fi rst step to acquire repose, healing is the action of repose itself. Healing recognizes grief, names it, and begins to forgive it. Forgive what, though? More than the specifi c pain that one addresses, healing is that process that forgives the fact that the human condition is inevitably one that grows cluttered with the junk pile of pain and grief. Therefore, by healing we forgive ourselves.

One might well observe that cemeteries hold no special magic that enables the twofold process. One might do the same labor of repose in a bedroom, a garden, or a monastery. This is true, perhaps, but often even a monastery, as Henri Nouwen discovered in The Genesee Diary, can be too much of this world. We mentally engage the fact that we are alone, but seldom do we perceive the telos of our separation. We enter a state of being without action, like a cryogenic chamber of suspended animation.

The cemetery, perforce, brings us beyond ourselves, from my grief to grief itself. Here we weep over the universal bones of suffering. Perhaps that is why we moderns so assiduously avoid cemeteries, even to visit the graves of departed loved ones. Cemeteries are so thoroughly empty of living humanity. Instead, we use routine, usu-ally in our cars at 40 mph, to bypass the confrontation and ignore the reality. We are so very full of living, after all, that we have no time for death. The dying and death of others always appears as a rude intrusion, an unwelcome guest lingering about the door with gnarled fi st upraised. When the dying is done, we hurry to commit the body and escape back to the routine. Consequently, we have little time to think of our dying, our death, and, it seems to me, we are poorer as a humanity without engaging this one great sympathēs, this “feeling” of death that is as fundamental to our condition as birth.

This is the key ligament that holds together the anatomy of the cemetery. It is not fi nally about stones and acreage, nor the way the light falls on a June morning. It is about ourselves—deeply, power-fully, personally about ourselves.

* * *It is Mother’s Day. I am standing now before my mother’s

grave, holding sprigs of lilac and red tulips in my hand. They are tied together with a thick rubber band, pale green. I do not kneel; I bend and drop them carefully on the headstone. There is a reason for this act. The large old house I grew up in had a screened side

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porch, shaded and fragranced by aged lilac bushes. Next to the porch was my mother’s sewing room. At ten every morning, coffee time, she would call through the screens to the neighbor next door, and they would sit, and gossip, and laugh on the screen porch. The scent of lilacs suffused the air. My father grew tulips, almost all of them fl ame red, in his garden. Every spring large bouquets of red tulips and lavender lilacs paraded through the rooms of our house. They were my mother’s favorite colors in a colorful and dramatic life. Standing over her grave, I am also standing by the screen porch, slightly dazed by the rich perfume. It is not only mother for whom I bring fl owers; it is for myself.

It was on Mother’s Day, 1994, that we admitted her to the hospital for the fi rst time. What was fi rst diagnosed as a bladder infection was cancer. It was mercilessly virulent, eating its path of destruction toward death in under six months. Mother bought the fi rst pair of pants in her life for the radiation treatments, perhaps the hardest concession for a lady who had sewn and proudly worn her own dresses, often of a remarkably creative and fl amboyant style, all her life. I remember sitting in the living room to tell them the news that there was nothing more the doctors could do. She asked me, “Do they say how long I’ll live?” Finally the realist. “No, Mom. They wouldn’t tell me that. But the cancer has spread fast.” She nodded. She waited to die until one day after my father’s 85th birthday.

I will visit the cemetery again to place a scarlet geranium at the head of my father’s grave. Father lived too long; or, he stopped living when my mother died. His body wouldn’t agree, his heart persistently beating through 85% occluded arteries, his brilliance diminished to a croaking husk at age 95, his world of life long disappeared through blindness and deafness. We prayed, ardently, for several years for his passing—a release from the prison of anguish. So the grass has scarcely fi lled in over his grave. Nor has my memory. It is too full of his pain. I turn my back on the fl aming geraniums and they howl at the sun.

* * *It is good for us, whose lives are full of so much living, to repose

for a time in the land of the dead. To be sure, many among us come here to bury our dead and never return. When we do come, we carry our different theologies, or none at all. We bear our different memories, or merely a questioning mind. Some come longing for forgiveness, others with the terrible burden of needing to forgive. The actions of confrontation and healing are profoundly individual, like the shape of our eyes or the pigment of our skin, or the scars on our memory. One has to give in to repose in an action of the will. Perhaps, then, one may fi nd the fi rst stepping stones that lead to

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the gate of the garden where one discovers rest. While there is no magic at work in the cemetery qua cemetery—

being merely a few acres of land plotted and pieced by graves and marked by stones or metal plaques or worn pieces of wood—one does sense the “otherness” to life itself. Sensing that, one begins to defi ne life itself. It requires a confrontation with the greatest de-mon set before any person—“why do we suffer and die?” And at the hospital of confrontation, where we name our wounds and where, as Eliot wrote in East Coker, “the wounded surgeon plies his steel,” we may not fi nd perfect answers. However, we submit to a process that begins our healing. Repose. May we rest in peace.

References

Becker, Ernst. Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973.Bryant, William Cullen. “Thanatopsis,” The Poetical Works of

William Cullen Bryant. Ed. Parke Godwin. New York: Appleton, 1883.

Eliot, T.S. “East Coker,” The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor, 1995.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor. Ed. Milton Stern. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1975.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1962.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “In Memoriam,” Selected Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1956.

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Nathan Brown

TAMALES AND DIRT —Santuario de Chimayó, New Mexico 2007

Chimayó sings holy songsin my ear, a sacred place…and it’s not just Leona’s tamalesthat inspire my devotion.

It is the hard, back row benchin the sanctuary that has cradledthe back pockets of innumerableburning souls, lit up by the torcheslife brings to all our little lynchings.

It is the healing dirt in the hole in the fl oor of the back roomthat I have rubbed into these pagesover the last few lost years…

the healing dirt in the hole in the fl oorthat the priest replenishesfrom a wheelbarrow every nightafter the pilgrims leave…

the healing dirt in the holethat I have wiped overmy two tattoos and foreheadso many times nowbefore going back intothe sanctuary to praythat God would lift the bouldersof darkness off my shrinking mind…

the healing dirtthat has dried hundredsof my tears, billionsof others’… absorbed theminto its divine drought.

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Carolyn Luke Reding

CEREMONYfor Kenneth Alexander Malcolm, 21-12 -07

The dusk that cloaks St. David’sdrains color from stained glass, yet sanctuary radiance dispels the gloom. Advent’s purple is vanquishedin anticipation of high celebration. Red roses and white adorn the altar,ruby ribbons anchor evergreen wreaths.

As the organist charms keys, petals and pipes into Praise, my soul, the King of heaven,Choir, Presenters, and Bishop beginthe processional through the center aisle.Brocade trimmed in satin enhances the drama, crimson and gold honor the Holy Ghost.

White-robed in grace and favor, the ordinand stands for ordination, declares his loyalty to church, its doctrines, disciplines, and worship.Encouragement and warm applause swirl around him.

Veni Creator Spiritus and the laying on of handsconsecrate the candidate, then other hands vest the new priest in scarlet stole and chasuble.Not without a bit of fear and trembling,he passes the peace.

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus echoesthe ancient praise of Angels and Archangels.Communion hymns Bless the Lord.Final prayers implore the Holy Spirit,while The Church’s one foundation defi nes the recessional.Stained glass glimmers for a moment.

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Lyman Grant

IT IS NOT THAT Iwelcome disasterlike a slave mid-passage conjures the sea.

I accept eachgenerous day as a childgrasps each

toy surprise offered from low,colorful drawersat the dentists’,

Colleen serving teain the morning,each son, his own particular

joy like a stampgranting himadmission tothese wonders.

At night, wegather aroundthe table, takeeach others’

hands and blessthis meal, ourlives, you.The candles,

we burn foryou at evening’send to shadows.So in case you

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didn’t hear mebefore, I am readywhen you are.My family will

know where tofi nd me. Theywill know I amwaiting for them,

waiting to offeranother grace.

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John Alexanderson

PROMISSORY

…when I get an opportunity I will send for you. —Acts 24:25 (Darby Translation)

I’ll get to it After my degree career and married raise up fi rst rate kids learn to love schoolbus drivers homeroom teachers little league coaches bring cookies to those those jerks with dogs next door then I’ll be set except I had divorce startjob-remarry have new kids … faith’s foremost these days so drop them off on Sundays, read The Times, think about Him just a bit then wait for emptynest when I’ll move and try to fi nd a church with nice retreats no sin no hell read the Bible through for sure oh but now I have to get through Christmas and that conference in LA since I need the bucks and tax time always breaks things up as do monday mornings anyway it’s snowing and I need a rest the car won’t start um I should travel France see the East and West then hone my golf perhaps my back will feel good at last but I’m so hectic-hopped I can hardly think at all and fi rst I must stop the sins confess-commune do choir and committees every week or even be an elder tithe and fast plus pray two times a day. Then I’ll be ready

Listen! … today is the day to be saved. —2 Corinthians 6:2 (TEV)

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Tony Reevy

DREAMING OF LUMINARIAS AT NOCHE BUENAWith tonight being Christmas Eve magical things can occur—one of which is the folklore belief that animals can speak. Anyone still possessing a barn that contains farm animals can—if they’re very quiet and careful—sneak up to it at midnight and hear their livestock discussing their master; just as the animals in the stable on that fi rst Christmas night discussed the arrival of the Great Master. —The Waterman and Hill-Traveller’s Companion, a Natural Events Almanac

Paper-caged light from candles etching plumb lines of buildings,

occasional fl icker fl are burn as wind blows paper against fl ame—courtyard, orange

bonfi re torching, chimneys, woodstove fl ues, fume of pinyon, San Miguel’s

tolls ending Misa, people drifting home—boy breaks

from family, looks in establoto see animals kneel,

greet the Lordwith rare, soon-vanished gift of God’s Word.

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Larry D. Thomas

IN WHITENESS BRIGHT AND VAST

Near San Luis Pass, out in the middleof Galveston Bay, but inchesabove water level, an island rises

blanketed completely with hundredsof white pelicans, hundreds of orangebills tilted at the same miraculous

angle like the bayoneted rifl esof a silent drill team, a dazzlingwhite blizzard in the middle

of the bay of hundreds of whitepelicans coughing and croaking the actof pure being, steeped in whiteness

so bright, so vast that onlya miracle, fl ung from nothingnessby the hand of God, could render it.

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Larry D. Thomas

LAUNDRY WOMAN(drawing by John Biggers)

She’s fl anked by the oak and iron potsof brutal labor, in one of whichleans a washboard leading the eye

upward like a staircase to a backdropof clean clothes hanging on a line,billowing in the breeze for stark contrast

to the tensile strength of the drawing’sheart of her massive hands and forearms,rippling with tendon and muscle,

wrenching the dark decades, snappinglike matchwood the chains of slavery,sketched for all time in graphite

everlasting as deep within the eartha vein of ageless coal: soft, black,and lustrous with the power of her soul.

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Larry D. Thomas

THE CROSS(Van Horn, Texas)

The yards of the barrioare red, compacted earth.The sun and the wind

are their gardeners. Cactiare all they know of grass.At the barrio’s edge, inching

one bleak plot at a timetoward the mountains, liesthe campo santo on one

of whose crude cedar benchessits an old woman dressed in black.Perpendicular to her dark

vertical countenance, cradledin her arms, cringes a newbornswaddled in a black, hand-made shawl.

As each stares into the other’sancient, deeply wrinkled face,they make a perfect cross.

Till the sun sets, they staythis way, the red earthsettling on their cross like stardust.

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William B. Montgomery

I am a representational painter of real and imaginary people, animals, places and things. For the most part, I strive to create images that do not dictate a specifi c story, but instead leave the story up to each individual viewer. I endeavor to include multiple layers of meaning in my paintings as well as occasional satire and statements about the way we live. But ultimately the meaning of the painting must be drawn entirely by the viewer and no amount of words or explanation can evoke the unique sense of discovery and recognition that happens when a viewer responds to the image. For a painting to be relevant today—and one would hope in the future—it must touch upon truths that connect with the common and univer-sal themes that we all carry with us. In the way that dreams mold common objects into rich symbolism, I hope that my paintings will be interpreted uniquely by each individual. There are no right or wrong interpretations.

Much of my work is about confrontations between nature and civilization. Many of my images involve landscapes cluttered with discarded creations of the technological age; material to which I am strongly drawn for its symbolic as well as literal character. I have always been fascinated with the occurrence of dead cars, abandoned appliances and rotting furniture in the most unlikely wild places and how plants and animals adapt to their presence. This detritus of civilization also reveals a great deal about humans and their values. In our culture we seem to have become distanced from the natural world and from its daily cycles of life and death. We have also lost our spiritual connection with nature, and consequently, we have become alienated from each other, much like displaced appliances left stranded in fi elds to rust.

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Living Room with CoyotesWilliam B. Montgomery © 2008

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Reckless AbandonWilliam B. Montgomery © 2008

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CaracaraWilliam B. Montgomery © 2008

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Still Life with Wild LifeWilliam B. Montgomery © 2008

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White CalfWilliam B. Montgomery © 2008

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CotullaWilliam B. Montgomery © 2008

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Prince of Toads, Bufo MarinusWilliam B. Montgomery © 2008

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Joe R. Christopher

TWO REVIEWS: INTERVIEWS AND ESSAYS• Conversations with American Writers: The Doubt, the

Faith, the In-between, by Dale Brown (interviewer). Grand Rapids: Williams B. Eerdmans, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-8028-6228-0. $18)

• Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak about their Writing and their Faith, by Jennifer L. Holberg (edi-tor).Grand Rapids: Williams B. Eerdmans, 2006. (ISBN 978-0-8028-3229-0. $16)

Both of these books are concerned with writers—mostly novel-ists—and their religious attitudes. Brown’s book has ten interviews and Holberg’s has four interviews—one of a movie director—and seventeen essays by writers. Actually, from the copyrights, all but one of the essays started as talks or papers read at Calvin Col-lege’s Festival of Faith and Writing (begun in 1990)—rather like the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor’s Writers’ Festival. Perhaps sometime, in fi fteen or twenty years, those papers by the guests of honor that appear in Windhover will make up a book.

Are these well-known authors? Well, in Holberg’s collection, Madeleine L’Engle has “The Cosmic Questions”—and most of us have read her. Kathryn Patterson has two essays, one of them about, in part, her novel The Great Gilly Hopkins (which I haven’t read) and the other about, in part, Bridge to Terabithia (which I have). Others in Holberg are Frederick Buechner (with a sermon, I think, not a talk on writing), Kathleen Norris, Walter Wangerin, Jr, Ron Hansen, Anne Lamott, and Luci Shaw (a rare poet in the group). Dale Brown has an interview with Ernest Gaines (not a believer but writing about the society he grew up in, with a strong emphasis on church and belief), Ron Hanson (again), and Jan Karon (who also has an essay in Holberg). Probably some of these names are familiar to most readers of Windhover. And I may have left out the name you (as an individual) know best, but I have meant to be suggestive, not listing everyone.

Since Holberg’s collection is titled Shouts and Whispers, let’s start with that. It comes from Doris Betts’ essay “Whispering Hope.” She quotes Flannery O’Connor, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling fi gures.” Betts replies, “I—like many mothers and kindergarten teachers—have found the whisper can also be effective.” Betts says that her characters, in contrast to O’Connor’s, are “[l]ike the descendants of

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Job’s second cousins once removed”:...they struggle through a long weekday process that includes losses and boils until in the end God does not so much answer their questions as silence them, simply by being there, so that my characters end by saying—or maybe whispering—“Mine eyes seeth Thee.” Some of them might add, “That is You, isn’t it?”

This suggests more than one way to write religious fi ction. Some will shout; some will whisper. This is not the same distinction as directness and indirectness, for O’Connor is not always direct (think of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”).

Jan Karon, who shows up in both books, is the author of a se-ries of novels about a town named Mitford, based on Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Her main protagonist is an Episcopal priest, Father Tim. What she says in her essay and in her interview is that she is writing realistically about good people. I haven’t read any of her books, but the interview indicates that she has been successful in reaching a large audience. She comments about the national Epis-copal Church,

Father Tim is a good fellow, an orthodox believer who preaches the truth. I’m just not happy in the mainstream church anymore. I mean it’s been years really…. You see, I am a Baptist, really, at heart. I’m Episcopalian in Virginia [where she now lives] and allied with the church and support this diocese. But in Blowing Rock [her home town] I’ve joined as an associate member of the Baptist Church.

The point is not about denominationalism per se but about the type of Christianity that Karon is presenting. This is part of the reason for her popularity, I suspect.

Although I don’t fi nd a good example in these two books, some writers present a very liberal version of Christian belief also. For example, Michelle Blake wrote three mystery novels about eight years ago: The Tentmaker (1999), Earth Has No Sorrow (2001), and The Book of Light (2003). Her protagonist is Lily Connors, a female Episcopal priest, whose best friend is a homosexual Episcopal monk. In the third book, Lily has a sexual affair with a layman—a Roman Catholic. Needless to say, the books are laid in northern urban America, not the small town of the South. Her novels seem to have been successful enough, although not popular at Karon’s level, and in an interview on the internet Blake mentions working on the fourth in the series. I don’t know why they stopped, since her publisher was presumably happy.

My point is that authors have to choose in this world what sort

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of Christian view they are presenting—there is an audience for both conservative and liberal varieties.

In addition to Gaines, one fi nds in Brown’s book David James Duncan and Sheri Reynolds. Duncan a Montana author with a Seventh-Day Adventist background, says, “Reynolds, who grew up in the Pentecostal Church but refused to be baptized,” says, “I don’t go to church anymore; there just aren’t churche3s that will have me, really.” But the majority of the people interviewed are active Christians, including two mystery writers with believing detectives (Eleanor Taylor Bland and Terence Faherty).

What conclusions are to be drawn? None, of a rule-laden sort. These books provide an introduction into literary Christian works, not the formula fi ction in most Christian bookstores. One plus for Brown’s book is the list of the author’s works and the short biog-raphy before each interview. A few authors come from Christian backgrounds and have some Christian material in their works, but most are church members. Their ways of writing (when described) vary a great deal; their presentations of belief vary very much (shout-ing vs. whispering, and in other ways). Some are very successful in gaining a readership, while others seem surprised that they have readers at all. But all of them struggle with the art and with what they have to say. For others involved in the same process, they may provide not so much inspiration as comfort, the knowledge that one is not alone.

These are good books for those seeking the serious Christian writers to read—and for those who want an affi rmation of a Chris-tian calling in the arts.

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Michael H. Lythgoe

OMNIBUS POETRY BOOK REVIEWS: SO MUCH SMALLER

My Shining Archipelago, • by Talvikki Ansel. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997. ISBN: 0-3000-07031-4 (paper). 56+ pages. $22.Beacons,• poetry chapbook by Alan Berecka. Wichita, KS: Oil Hill Press Chapbook Series #4. 2007. ISSN: 1540-8337. 20 pages. $5.Writing The World,• essays by Kelly Cherry. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 1995. ISBN: 0-8262-0992-0. 147 pages. $22.Line Dance, • poems by Barbara Crooker. Cincinnati, OH: Word P, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-933456-92-8 (paper). 79 pages. $15.Mine, • poetry chapbook by Angel Alaimo O’Donnell. Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line P, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-59924-167-8. 27 pages. $12.The Border• , poems by Cleatus Rattan. Huntsville, TX: Texas Review P, 2002. ISBN: 1-881515-47-8 (paper). 76 pages. $20.Take Your Time Coming Home• , poems by Cleatus Rattan. Huntsville, TX: Texas Review P, 2005. ISBN: 1-881515-82-6 (paper). 81 pages. $13.Buffalo Yoga• , poems by Charles Wright. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. ISBN: 0-374-5292963-9 (paper). 79 pages. $20.Scar Tissue, • poems by Charles Wright. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006. ISBN: 0-374-25427-3 (cloth). 73 pages. $17.

Between the summer solstice and the 4th of July, I sat on a porch in a white rocker enjoying breezes when they came. A hawk rode thermals until the raptor became a period in the sentence of skywriting. This was, in part, preparation for meeting the makers of the poems I have gathered in this review. As I admired day lilies, lemon loud, and hydrangeas played their blues, I could feel the ghost of James Dickey passing by in South Carolina. Now we can recover something James Dickey left us, a poet for the future. We can also ponder the Ghost of God with Charles Wright and holy ghosts with others in our fi eld of dreamers.

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Dickey died in January of 1997. The year before he selected his last book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, My Shining Archi-pelago, by Tallikki Ansel. In the forward, Dickey wrote:

Ansel fi nds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnifi cence, the perverse pluralism, the never-failing imagination based on burning and burning out, death already quivering with rebirth, and behind that, death and rebirth again. (vii)

Summer is a good time to read about “burning and burning out,” about rebirth. As these words are being put on paper, there are forest fi res raging in California near Big Sur. Hostages were just freed from the jungles in Columbia. Talvikki Ansel writes poems about the intense hot house natural wonders of South America’s Amazon. Among other wonders in her words is the “sheer exotic” of plant and animal life. Dickey notes that romantic poets “like to be overwhelmed by nature” (vii). But poems from the jungle are rare. Ansel’s world is no ordinary forest, but the Rain Forest.

Dickey reminds us that “Mallarmé, according to Symbolist doctrine, thought the poet should not describe the trees but convey ‘the horror of the forest.’” The poems in My Shining Archipelago live up to this command. In her description of the jungle, her colors collide, and Dickey notes that she engages her world with passion that is refl ected in “the orchids, the piranha, [and] the fer de lance” (vii). She sustains her focus in spite of this disconcerting power, “bringing into language the hellish magnifi cance” and “primal fear” of her world (vii). In Dickey’s words, her colors are “collision colors: a single stripe on a butterfl y wing is painful” (vii).

As exciting as it was to reread the old poems (1996) and to experi-ence again the praise heaped on them by Dickey, my purpose here is to celebrate how poetry can renew our lives through language—the true Mallarméan azur where a redtail hawk is skywriting.

A scattering of mottled seed, spots of the moon-and-stars melon. A cobalt sea slips between cliffs and sand- circled bays. Tug boats, a shadow of a coasting gull. (“My Shining Archipelago” 47)

In Writing The Word, Kelly Cherry, a writer of fi ction, poetry, and memoir, shows how words can transport us anywhere. In searching out language we fi nd beauty. This book of essays looks for understanding what it means to write from any particular place. Her creative non-fi ction essays chart a course from Cleveland to Yalta,

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Wisconsin to Latvia, England to the Arizona desert, Mexico or the Philippines. Kelly Cherry writes to know the world. In her essay, “Art and Redemption,” she says,

I write to redeem lost time, lived time, to buy time back from the High Priest of Death. Any less passionate, despairing, catholic, or economical use of words seems to me sentimental, lacking humor....The writer, you see, can’t buy time back the way it was; she can only buy it back the way it will be forever. (21)

We cannot actually buy back the time we have lost with words nor money.

A New Testament God, more tenderhearted than any revenuer, gives up his son to redeem the world from the wages of sin. But your life won’t accomplish that—nor mine. (21)

The only thing we possess that is precious with an equivalent value, Cherry says, is memory—since memory does bring back the past. She tells the story of how her parents did not believe in God so much as in the beauty created by Beethoven. Her own memory treasures a valuable Guadagnini violin her father played and left to her. Her parents both played violins in a string quartet. There was always music in the houses (or tenement fl ats) of her childhood.

Language—let us dare to say, though it may seem at fi rst an inversion—needs writers. The writer doesn’t really redeem lost time. That time is gone, is dead; writers can re-make, but they can’t resurrect. But writers do redeem something—they redeem all those words that are otherwise lost in no-time. They buy back the language. They give it to the future. (24)

Language is the instrument of the writer. We make words with our voice box as violinists play their instruments. Cherry believes “words are real as wood” in a stringed instrument. Poets struggle with words. Are they signifi ers? Symbols? She believes that “words are not names. They are not tokens” (24). Words are all we have to work with. But we are not really creators, she says. Writers are performers. Writers “make, with their words, a kind of music.... The compositions that they play is time” (24). Cherry believes we are only allowed to borrow “time and lost life, lost love, the remembrance of things past.” But as writers we can gain “by inevitable, fantastic,

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wonderful error, the future” (25). The “innumerable futures” of our writing, of other writing, become the “exponential base of further futures. This world, and this world, this world, and all of them as they will be forever, sentence without end” (25).

We ought to listen to the language. No hawk to put a period to the imagination’s writing in Mallarmean azur. Language is our rich treasury. Our words can be like the miracle of the loaves and fi shes. They can “multiply like crazy, performing miracles of ambiguity, irony, parodox, and metaphors” (26). Cherry writes, “I want to save the language from any god that would devour it.” There is no limit to the imaginative space we can create for our writing. Let us give thanks to those writers who inspire our words with new possibilities and a need for self-re-creation.

In another essay, “A Conversation Around Southern Poetry,” Cherry and Henry Taylor speak to how Southern poetry is informed by loss, a lost war, death, recollections of funerals—how the past is so immediate to Southern poets. I would argue, since all Southern poets do not live in the South (Kelly Cherry is back in southern Virginia now), poets generally have written of love, war, death and God(s). Reading Cherry’s essays I am reminded we can write our future by not going anywhere. We can write in place. T. S. Eliot wrote, “We must be still and still moving.”

Let us now turn to Charles Wright (Buffalo Yoga, 2004), a poet from Tennessee who teaches in Virginia and keeps a cabin in Mon-tana. Every time I embrace a new collection of Wright’s poetry, I am entranced, I get those hot and cold feelings inside my chest that Miss Emily wrote about. Wright’s world is usually his yard and neighbor-hood in Charlottesville, Virginia—changing with the season, inspired by views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He knows his constellations. He writes in place, but travels in outer space. His poems can read like they were translated from ancient Chinese scroll paintings. He redeems memories of his ancestors in the Civil war and of his time as a soldier serving in Italy. In his poetry, Donna Seaman notes an eloquent “union between nature and human consciousness.” He con-templates mortality; his language celebrates sensuality and beauty, even if his zodiac in the end leads him to darkness.

Buffalo Yoga is a lovely summer read. It relishes the landscape, ever changing, renewing where “The fi sh in the waters of heaven gleam like knives” (4). He writes about the absence of God. His landscape is “Godless”:

I write, as I said before, to untie myself, to stand clear, To extricate an absence, The ultimate hush of language, (fricative, verb, and phoneme),

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The silence that turns the silence off. (“There Is a Balm In Gilead” 4)

In his long title poem for this volume there is much to appreciate. The wind taps at the window like “God’s ghost” then “drags his chains through the evergreens” (9). Nature appears to the poet like a beautiful church:

Golden sap on the lodgepole pine mosaicked and ByzantineInside the day’s cupola,Cuneiform characters shadowed across the forest fl oor.

Everything seems immediate, like splinters of the divine. (“Buffalo Yoga” 9)

This vision and description call to mind ancient art and ancient lands, old religions and the fi rst written language in the cradle of civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates. But “God’s ghost... / mumble[s] and mutter[s]” in the wind, “distance like doomsday loose in his hands” (9). In Wright’s yogic meditations, the full moon of the last night is a memory. Time wears “Us down and away...” (13).

There’s no erasing the false-front calligraphy of the past.

There’s no expunging the way the land lies, and its windfall glare.

I never did get it right.

When the great spider of light unspools her links and chains,

May the past be merciful, the landscape have pity on me—Forgive me my words, forgive me my utterances. (13)

Summer saddens and grows hot. (14)

But Wright in his heated contemplation of an empty fi eld rec-ognizes new fl owers are rising from the dead. He feels the “itchings for ultimate form.”

The morning darkens. A wind from the north, winter wind,Harassing the blue lips

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of lupine and cornfl ower.Like souls of the half-begotten, dead mosses fold their stiff hands.The trees continue their slow dismemberment and fall.If there were graves up here they would open at your feet,The mother appearing in summer and sweet decay. (17)

This is suggestive of our lives waning even as they ripen. The poet seems to be contemplating a creative process even as he engages in it. He sees the world, describes it, and is conscious of what he is writing, thinking, always leaping in his imagination to something after this life. But the literal world is literary. We are living in a world of writings:

The world is a magic book, and we its sentences.We read it and read ourselves. We close it and turn the page down And never come back,Returned to what we once were before we became what

we are.This is the tale the world tells, this is the way it ends

(22)

His poem “Rosso Venexiano” is inspired by a photograph of the poet with his wife in Venice in 1969 (perhaps when he was traveling on a Guggenheim fellowship). It is a sensual rendering of a time and place bathed in reds. The poet remembers Ezra Pound on his daily walks in the same neighborhood years before. “Palazzo this and Palazzo that,” he muses, then the poet fi nds his voice by hearing a voice:

Write, the voice said. For whom? came the response.For the dead whom thou didst love, came the instant

reply.And will they read me?Aye, for they return as posterity, the voice answered one

last time.Red of Titian’s Assumption, red of the Doge’s fi ngernail, Blood red of the Serenissima,Lagoon light, sunset and cloud blaze, red of the Cardinal entourage. (44)

The poet realizes a photo cannot reveal the future. A photo freezes a moment in time. The imagination, the mind’s memory, recovers that moment, adds color, and keeps it for the page. Charles Wright’s poems

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pass on the words capturing Venice; we have those words now to work with, as art. Here in language are words, paintings, history, religious imagery. But in poetry, the language has the luxury of stepping out of real life to communicate. Briefl y, some secrets last.

Wright’s collection, Scar Tissue appeared two years later in 2006. I am a prisoner in the “Stations” of his lines—but the seasons change, the weather changes in Appalachia, in Italy, in Montana. The poems in this collection begin in winter weather. Advent was golden, but now we look ahead to ashes and Easter (3). The endless sky, the landscape, the evening sun going down—

It seems, somehow, to ignite us into a false love for the physical world.

Our mouths full of ashes, our mouths full of fresh fi re, phoenix-like,Wide wings over wider lives, We open and close on demand, we open and close. (“Scar Tissue” 34)

Wright fi nds it impossible to say good-bye to the past. He is always searching for something more. “There is a desperation for unknown things, a thirst / For endlessness that snakes through our bones / Like a lit fuse looking for Lethe” (38-39).

Upstream by now, little dark points, the blackbirds invisible

As yesterday’s prayers. But working hard, Lord, working hard. (39)

Wit and work. The poet is working hard, too, with irony, because he can’t “believe,” but can’t stop believing either—continually haunted by a need to express in his poetry, prayer, or references to prayers.

Pity the people Lord, pity their going forth and their coming back,Pity their sumptuous barricades against the dark.Show them the way the dirt works.Show them its sift, the aftermath and the in-between.Wet days are their own reward now, litter’s lapse and the pebble’s gleam. (“Scar Tissue II” 40)

The poems in Scar Tissue are about new skin covering old

wounds. They investigate the tenuous relationship between descrip-

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tions and actuality, the differences between the material world and our immaterial thoughts and dreams. A thing is not an image. We have heard Kelly Cherry investigate the same mystery of language and art and imagination. Recently former Poet Laureate, Robert Haas did so again in his new collection, Time and Materials, which shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. On Newshour, Haas quoted his late friend and mentor, the poet Czeslaw Milosz: “Reality, what is it in words?” In Haas’s own words, he says, “No. There are limits to saying, / In language, what the tree did.” Charles Wright, in this time of bad weather in winter, offers sound advice in his closing poem, “Singing Lesson”:

Therefore when the Great Mouth with its two tongues

of water and ash Shall say, Suffer the darkness, Suffer the darkness to come unto you, suffer its singsong,And you will abide, Listen to what the words spell, listen and sing the song. (69)

Poet and Fordham University professor, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, has been known to sing as a part of her public poetry readings. She has also had some of her poems set to music by a duo in Baltimore. Her songs rise from an Italian immigrant family background, full of loss and coal dust, dug out of the Pennsylvania mining world. Her words reveal a dark beauty, a truth of lives laboring in black, cold nights, fi red by prayers and a music she rec-reates with rusty shovels, “the sluff of slippers across the kitchen” echoing Johnny Cash lyrics (“Northern Nights” 5), recitations of litanies of Italian family names found on grave stones visited on Sunday afternoons.

The poems in Mine are mostly elegiac in tone, lyrics of family, of a home life, of rituals, of landscapes in smoke, of hard love. There are poems for her mother who took lovers when she was made a widow:

Young ones. Dark ones. True ones,

the kind that came back,parked their cars in the drive,

and slept in our house night after night after night. (“Other Mothers” 6)

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There are also poems of a daughter remembering a lost father and of a mother now raising her own sons. Inspiring and well-wrought, O’Donnell’s poems are witty, dusted with humor, dark at their roots. One of her mother’s boyfriends is remembered in a vision of a musician who sang “blue” songs and drove a rusty Mustang into a bitter-sweet, burning wreck:

Too young, too risky,too married, and too freefor a widow with threedaughters and two grown sons. (“Blues Man” 11)

Her stanzas ring with good sounds, drive on with a regular rhythm, perfect for conveying her bluesy theme, hinting at death cheated by a song:

I watch you stride slowaway from the burning wreck.You don’t hear us calling.You’re singing as you go. (12)

O’Donnell’s literary strengths are more than musical. She writes strong narratives informed by striking, smoking imagery, using the language of digging, mining the Underworld for black truth; lives recov-ered in her story-poems are retold—an arsonist cousin (“Fool’s Art”), a living room over a mine shaft, where the poet remembers “holy Mary on the western wall / suffering her sword-pierced heart” (“Grandmother’s Living Room” 10). Her scenes are rich with literary allusions, such as this nod to Dante’s Inferno in “Grandmother’s Living Room”:

Never did we move the ground that lay beneath our feet.No lost souls rose to guide usthrough the winding world we conjured.No matter how loud we shouted.How wild we danced. (10)

Or this one in “Dante in the Kitchen”:

The dinner hour approaches,Ugolino gnaws on the head of Ruggieri.My children ask for hamburgers,The red fl esh fashioned, ready- Wrapped in measured portions,And stored in the coldest depths of the freezer. (19)

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Such a wonderful choice of words: “measured portions” of a poetry, stored in a poem reminiscent of cold depths (keep emotion at a distance, under control) but hot as a literary hell. She concludes her poem with a meditation on how her mother’s world and her professor’s world seem to combine with Dante’s Underworld in her deep imagination:

Our worlds do not mesh, Mine and Dante’s,Anywhere better than hereIn this waning afternoon placeOf transformations.I glide across the linoleumIn my gilded, lead-lined apron,Light the fl ame on the broiler,And breathe the hot heat. (19)

The Italian poet bows to her ancestors and cooks for her family. How nourishing is the art she serves us.

Angela O’Donnell’s poetry joins the spirit of Charles Wright, who also is informed by Dante’s literary landscape. But she can fi nd the transcendent that Wright fi nds elusive. She also questions crevices, explores mine shafts, glides over dangerous landscapes, shines her miner’s lamp into the holes of the human heart, believing it is her “task to stir these still waters” of her family’s past (20).

Shall I lie down beside them, one by one, and breathe the breaths that rise from them like

prayersand lay lash on lash, cool cheek on cheek,wade deep into their sepia waters? Once there no music could call me back. No season’s bargain, no lover’s tender lyre.No toppled towers fl aming in the distance.No one’s daughter. No one’s mother. No one’s wife. (“Waking The Children” 20)

So beautiful. So contemplative. O’Donnell’s poem here is post 9/11. She teaches in NYC. She knows the landscape, the city-scape. But her poetry is heated with a power that comes from the core of our earth, made palpable in a language that is reverential for soul-making. Those who know her readings at the UMHB Writers’ Festival know she is obsessed with Moby Dick. She closes this col-lection with a tribute to lasting art which she admires. Her words

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are also a fi tting comment on her own art, at once striving for now and for the eternal.

These marks, too, hieroglyphic,A language of eternity and once. (“Tattoo” 24)

A full-length collection of Angela O’Donnell’s poetry, Moving House, is forthcoming from Word Press. For those who know her poems in Windhover, you will look forward to meeting more of her “saints,” from the Jesuit martyrs to Frank Sinatra, so Italian, so musical. Mine has become ours.

Alan Berecka is a different kind of poet. His stories come from another landscape. Berecka’s background is Polish. He was raised in New York state. His poems about his father are close to mythic, and often quite funny. He is also a poet of narrative skills, who makes his living as a reference librarian in Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Beacons is his second chapbook. If you have enjoyed his poems in Windhover, you will be familiar with his poetry and appreciate what he shares aesthetically with the other poets we are perusing here (particularly, Rattan, O’Donnell, and Crooker). Berecka’s collection includes fourteen poems, suffused with religious references, soul-searching, an almost aching reverence for the rituals and prayers of his Roman Catholic upbringing.

In “The Theology of Dodge Ball,” Berecka the theologian, muses on violence, prayers and hurricanes—fusing, connecting, hurting:

Coastal rosaries and prayerchains snap into action. Prayersgo out to the God of Mercyand compassion, to the creatorof all things on heaven and Earth to steer this dark agent of destruction onto another path.

Once the barrage ends, the strickenwill be consoled and told that painis the price of playing the game.The spared will heap praiseon a loving God, as a stained ballslowly rolls back across a gym fl oor, while somewhere out in the tropics a hot sea heaves and swells.

But these poems have their pubescent moments, too, as in “God’s

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Radio,” a meditation on breasts and the Sign of the Cross, or “St. Peter’s Square 1979,” which relates a very funny story of shouting the wrong Polish words to the late polish Pope on a college visit to Rome. It is very popular in his public readings. His poem, “Skel-etons,” combines John Paul II, “breasts,” his father, his mother, and a t-shirt: “The Pope looked / up smiling, her breasts resting in his open palms.”

Family is also a major theme for this poet who seems to value real life more that art, however much his art is informed by life’s lessons. Two poems in this collection honor his daughter, “Beacons,” and “For My Daughter as She leaves Home.” This second poem is a piece I much admire.

I fi nd it hard to accept the miraculous.Still, once you have moved on from here,should you lose faith in your own worthor in the fact that you are loved, I praythat this cheap piece of paper on which Ihave labored with my simple art might become a sliver of my own certain heart.

This poem skates perilously close to the sentimental, saved

by Berecka’s way of using a trope: hosts, transformed in legends he remembered from his youth, to bleeding slivers of fl esh from a human heart.

There are also two library poems in this collection, which is no surprise, since Berecka is too often asked about Philip Larkin (the late English poet-librarian). But for this reader, Alan Berecka is at his strongest when struggling with his theology, as in “Remember-ing The Body.”

Once graced with this glimmer of Christfreed from Gnostic beliefs, I returnto give thanks for the creedwhich states that Christ rose to reign forever, his body restored—a bright, blood fi lled vessel—moldedin the image of the Creator, as are we.

These words were composed by a poet of the body, the soul, and the funny bone.

For Wright, who writes of landscapes in Chinese-like medita-tions, his subject is “language and the ghost of God,” as the blurb on the dust jacket puts it. As he writes of the “dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate his poems...[he] illuminates and

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exalts in the entire spectrum of existence” (Booklist). Where Wright sees fi sh gleaming in heaven like knives, Cleatus Rattan fi nds his fi sh as swimmers in a creek somewhere west of Fort Worth, near Cisco, where he has a ranch. If Wright is more contemplative, Rattan is more narrative. Like Kelly Cherry, Rattan writes to redeem memo-ries. Along with Wright and Elizabeth Bishop, Ansel, and Dickey, he shares an eye for details. He can follow specifi c references to fl owers and fauna in his imagination to form an elegy, or turn to wisdom a lesson learned from an old cowboy companion on horseback.

Two examples: in “Whispers” he remembers a girl friend from the choir trip in high school who fi rst “put herself in my hands,” secretly in the bus barn. He pays tribute to her memory; she was later in life a choir director who died of breast cancer. His sobering lines read:

Always in my viewone violet liesby the bus barn wallwith light moth wing shadowsfanning its petals. (27)

In “Looking Deep,” he recounts a ride to “far away work” with his cowboy friend and neighbor, Johnny. In the creek he sees fi sh of different sizes and shapes, but looking “much the same.”

One comes upto stare then returns to his groupbubbling about something deep. (39)

Johnny sits on his roan and tells the poet,

it is a seasonal thingthat the fi sh are going somewhere.His insights are good enough for me.The world is full of secrets. (39)

And this poet’s poems contain a few secrets of their own. The poem resonates with me because of another tale of fi sh. Friends in my neighborhood have a pond where they kept koi—until raccoons came at night as predators will do to prey. Researching koi, I learned they can recognize the footsteps of their feeders, and they recognize faces, too. So the fi sh keep deep secrets and keep swimming, giving this reader much pleasure.

In The Border, which won the 2002 Texas Review Poetry Prize, Rattan writes of secrets in his heart and pays tribute to family, old

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friends, former teachers. He honors places, a landscape in Texas which seems to have become part of his soul—a cotton fi eld planted in violets by a maiden aunt (“Can These Flowers Live?”); “In Cisco, Texas,” there are fewer visitors than in urban San Francisco; his open spaces have bulls, horses, sheep, mesquite, scrub oak and “stars meandering / to nowhere known” (37).

Rattan is a former Marine. Honor was a word his father used. Honor speaks from his poetry. When he leaves to join the Corps, his father and his uncles see him off. Braced, he heard his father say, “Go to your war, if you must, / but come home with your shield or without it” (33). A serviceman can still tremble, sensing all the wars and all the sacrifi ces since the Greeks when reading these lines. This particular poem in a regular rhythm and subtle slant rhymes of fi fteen lines hovers near the traditional form of the sonnet. He composes several well-crafted sonnets, and practices keeping tradi-tional forms alive with a nod to Biblical passages or references (see “Genesis” 32), in poems like prayers (see “Tender Mercy” 75), or “In Pace Requiescat” (a poem written to his three sons). “What Comes Of Home Burial” (74) concludes with “Send some sign, a sacrament, a creed.” Yet Rattan, storyteller, Texas Poet Laureate (2004–2005), rancher, warrior, family man, professor—is a man of humor, too. Read “Father’s Perfect Funeral” to know joy as well as tears. We learn in these poems to “turn to home and tell no lies /...but hold the vision in high regard” (76). I hold the visions in The Border in very high regard. I take great pleasure in trailing his poetic lines.

Rattan’s second volume of poetry, Take Your Time Coming Home appeared in 2005. A year or so ago, when I heard Rattan reading some of his poems at the UMHB Writers’ Festival in Belton, he spoke of writing “differently.” He said something about letting his imagination lead him to a new place in his compositions. I sense in this volume, certainly in his newer poems, a looseness; the artist is becoming free of something, gaining inspiration, taking risks. His poems now are no less “tight,” but the compactness seems more vi-sionary, more mysterious, sometimes open-ended, as though penned by a shaman, full of magical powers and incantations, words forged in a fi ery imagination—raging at modern culture at times, at the gods of war, at the tightness of the Bible belt, with a nod to Eros.

The New York Times Magazine has called Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, “a colossus among critics....His enthusiasm for literature a joyous intoxicant.” Bloom wrote a small but wonderful pamphlet, The Art of Reading Poetry (2004). One of his many useful lessons is the term “strangeness,” in which he refers to “a differ-ent kind of consciousness from our own” (55). Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand; aesthetic imagination when we do.

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A poet’s words invite us to share in a strangeness—“a felt change in consciousness.” I believe Cleatus Rattan’s second volume, Take Your Time Coming Home, exhibits a new voice, a new strangeness. I have felt a change in my own consciousness reading this book.

Rattan has his way with death. He deals with his own imagined funerals in several poems. In “When I Die,” he instructs the reader (his survivors?) to surround the cemetery with the “repentant hymn-ing / fallen angels who sent me more than a dozen rejection slips each.” He asks to be buried with all his bad poems—but also with the “complete works of Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, and The Waste Land” (8-9). His visionary scene here is wild with rock and roll music and historical fi gures (kings and religious-puritanical-militants) who lost their heads in London executions. It is also charged with electric shocks for the “black and white minds” of the rejectionists. Besides the riotous imagery of an underworld where the poet penalizes his critics (not unlike Dante) with pains and celebrates with “Little Darling” by The Diamonds, I fi nd the poems by this poet-pharaoh, his lists of books to be buried with him in his tomb, informative: per-sonal myth-makers Blake and Coleridge, who both wrote to expand consciousness, and to fi nd the physical and the spiritual reunited; Shelley sailing in his “boat of my desire” is both Romantic and bold. And T. S. Eliot is our big Modernist, breaking some “rules” of the past, opening perceptions to close the gap between subject and object; Eliot creates new imagery from past masters, and uses language from a world of wars, urban blight, and global tongues.

We do not usually see ourselves as others see us. Rattan is also very mysterious in this collection. My thoughts on his poems may earn me electric jolts, too. But I fi nd his poetic fathers commend-able and revealing. His poem, “A Tour,” makes his house a shrine as he dies in the Bible belt, “underrated, under-understood”; look on his walls for “hieroglyphs.” Mourners will be “purifi ed / by the pilgrimage.” The past will be “subdued / to the useful and the good” (7). Earlier, in “Generations,” the poet refl ects on his father’s relent-less “desire /for my purifi cation by soul-cleansing, hand-chapping, / wet-works car cleaning. Sundays were eternal” in the world of his youth (5). Now the poet believes his own sons will remember differ-ent Sundays—where the demons were the Washington Redskins threatening the Dallas Cowboys. The TV will redeem them to “watch crops grow, the sun return, devils fl ex” (6).

This volume is divided into four parts: “Now And Then,” “The Nerve Of Some People,” “The Remainder,” and “The Players.” The fi rst two sections include a number of poems haunted by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. For instance, “Christmas in Seattle: On the Eve of War” contrasts the anticipation for unopened gifts and the imminence of war. In “Friendly Fire,” we see the reductive power of war:

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iron-winged sky hawksslipped in to burst an orange bubbleslightly above the headsof fourteen piecesof two menplaced inone bag. (17)

“I Told Him: The End of the Affair” is sparked by a ride on an airplane with a French offi cer, an observer who took pleasure in the speaker’s weakness in French, but then is stung when the American made fun of “Dien Bien Phooey.” The battle ends French power in Indo China, with wholesale surrender andimprisonment by the Vietnamese—contrasted with the staying power of the US Marines at the battle of Khe Sahn. Semper Fidelis (18). “Bobby Davis’s Fate” pays tribute to a crippled Vietnam Vet who suicides after an addiction to drugs:

A .45 slug spread his spirit over a slanted spire he raised

to salute mankind’s fate. (25)

There is bitter control in these lines. They contain sentiment for a boy who played football in high school, but they are not sentimen-tal. Bobby’s last job was working a crane above “civilized buildings squatting on the surface / of an exploding city” (25). Smoking visions of a Waste Land?

In “Family Vacation in the Mountains,” the persona in the poem has what is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Again the aftermath of war resonates: “wrong brain is in charge,” bad dreams, “mud pie paddy,” another dead soldier in pieces “protected from an open casket warm endorsement from his country” (26). The bad dreams from a combat tour are intensifi ed because the country hardly welcomes the soldier home. The fl ash-backs, the images are of other dead Marines “digging for time away from eternity,” ruined “re-visions / of old faithful land my wife fi nds beautiful” (26).

These examples of Rattan’s poetry remind us how some poems cannot be avoided. In this context inevitable means phrasing that cannot be avoided. It must be said. It is not predictable. It is central to great poetry, as in these poems in Take Your Time Coming Home.

There is much more worthy of our attention. But, alas, we are constrained by space, by time. Always Time and Space. I live in a place where thoroughbred horses are trained to race, an equestrian community. I am no horseman. But I admire the poems by Rat-tan, a cowboy who transfers the mythical qualities of Pegasus and

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Bucephalus to a blaze-faced sorrel in “Horse Trading”(38-39). His horse poems remind me of the writings by Henry Taylor, a Virginia poet, another “desperado.” These poems are also reminiscent of the novels by James Lee Burke, whose character, Dave Robicheaux, is a former New Orleans detective, a recovering alcoholic still haunted by demons from Vietnam, and the mean streets of the Big Easy. Robicheaux converses with the dead. He dreams of Confederate generals and his dead father, from whom he seeks advice. Burke and Rattan are equally at ease with dead ancestors in prayer and poetry. The poet and the fi ction writer can each tell a story that is true, but never happened. Outlaws.

In the end, these poems evoke the poet in the autumn of his years, facing a move into town, knowing the jackrabbits, coyotes, and rattlesnakes still need him. Obviously, the move is a metaphor for a bigger move soon to come. The aging poet becomes a Bohemian he never was before “discarding, / destroying treasures no one from our future wants” (“The Old Boys” 72). This is a little too close to home. The poet also sees the Earth spin “out of control in an undiciphered direction” (“What Did It Mean?” 59); he writes to inject a “controlling order / in or on his place” (“Dry” 57):

He wrotea condemnation of impressionistic art: fuzzythinking in a world desperately requiring clarity. (“Aesthetic” 53)

Other poems leave the reader with open-ended visions, fi t for Rattan’s ars poetica, as in “Heroine Turned Human” (48). “I love mystery,” he writes. Or, read “Remainder”: “My sons will look in the frozen space / of her eyes. They will see circles upon circles” (60). The paint is still not dry on the art of this artist. I look forward to more mystery, more strange beauty in more of his lines. Reading him raises my consciousness. His writing fl ies to transcendent heights. Yet he writes with a heart weighed down with gravitas.

Barbara Crooker is another Pensylvanian. If you were listening to NPR on July 15, when The Writer’s Almanac aired, you heard Garrison Keillor read one of Barbara Crooker’s poems. It was about her experiences as a “car hop” taking orders at a drive-in, her fi rst job. The atmosphere is rich with Grease and doo-wop. The full moon, as she describes it, is like a cheeseburger on a black grill. She uses extended metaphors well. Her language appeals to our senses. She can, like Kelly Cherry, redeem memory and language for the future. We can travel in her lines to exciting places, like Paris.

Line Dance is her second full collection. In these poems she dances with joy and with grief. She has the skill of concentration

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to focus deep into the physical world, real lives, real ancestors—and to imagine ancient maps and childhood games. Like Charles Wright, her subject in these poems is language. Her writing shows her experience as a word-smith, one who shapes the written word in traditional forms, tight, and freer, open verses. She has a way with phrases full of wisdom: “Snow is the mute language of loss” (“Valentine” 27).

Now we are at the heartof things, the bone chill of zero, the closed eyeof the pond. No secrets. Only stories the wind bringsas it howls down chimneys, whistles through eves.This is the blank text of the snow,these are the unwritten lines. (“Zero at the Bone” 26)

Always conscious of the multiple meanings in language, Crooker’s works here are meditations on the line—in works of art, in geog-raphy, on a map, in a dance, in a game, a fence line, “a chorus kick line.” The line is her artistic obsession:

No, I’m saying this: the spine, the matrix, the core of what’s laid down, then played over and over,improvised, embroidered, embellished. I love the way it moves away and then comes back, fi nds itself again, the hard line, the offi cial line,the line of scrimmage, one down, goal to go. (“Line” 31)

Crooker’s poems are not pick-up lines at a bar—they are her ars poetica, lifelines for “My autistic son listening to the oldies” (“45s, LPs” 47). Her collection is musical and about music. You can hear quarters slip down a jukebox for three plays of “slow songs you could dance to all night long?” But it is also a collection full of literary ancestors (Shakespeare), informing style (“A Sonnet for Mr. Rutherford” 46), references to the Sufi mystic poet, Rumi, allusions to a poem by Emily Dickinson, and echoes from the Old Testament. She has also used a lot of French in these lines, beginning with “‘The Map of the World, 1630,’ by Henricus Hondius” (22): “Somewhere in Corsica, my ancestors / work the land, raise olives, picking them / by hand from twisted trees” (22). She moves on to Section II where we fi nd “Les Faux Amis,” “Vol de Nuit / Night Flight,” “Climbing the Eiffel Tower at Night,” “Arabesque.” Always there is a celebration of language, words that are lovely to hear and to speak.

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If we follow the poems in Line Dance, where do we go? “See how loss / has shaped the topography, each contour line. / The map of the heart has no relief” (“The Geography of Grief” 21). But her poems also lead us to hope as well as loss. There is a faith in her lines.

Oh, how this world burns and burns us, yet we are not consumed. (“Euonymus alatus” 66)

We are also made aware of the human need to express something—emotion, love, feelings, ideas hard to put into words. In the opening poem, “Breath,” she describes her dying father:

His eyes were mild as a baby’s, full of love the tongue could notexpress. This was the best he could do. (19)

Closure. So it is hard to make poems out of our words. But lan-guage is all we have to work with. Cherry, Rattan, Wright, O’Donnell, Berecka, Crooker, Ansel—all have shown us how, in different ways, the struggle to say the unsayable is worth it. In the end we are back at the beginning. The last words of My Shining Archipelago are:

What I tell you, what I tell you—It is so much smaller than what I can not tell you. (56)

Poetry is all about verbal exploration and discovery and adventure. James Dickey heard the echo of Shelley in Ansel’s poem. In his De-fense of Poetry, Shelley wrote (and Dickey quotes in his Forward): “The most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet” (ix). Gerard Manley Hopkins seemed to almost lose his ability to express meaning in his poem “God’s Grandeur” when seeing the sun rise. He is fl ooded with the spirit of the Holy Ghost; it takes his breath away; he stops—lost for words: “...and with Ah! bright wings.” So much more we want to say. But we take our leave as dark clouds bringing a summer storm erase the calligraphy of the hawk writing in the sky, Mallermean azur. We seek the shade from the sun and cover before the storm. We must be still but still moving in the poetry we admire.

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ContributorsJohn Alexanderson is a Prudential retiree, school bus driver, disc jockey, and grandfather, in Doylestown, PA. He is thankful to still be a runner at age 64, to have been published somewhat frequently and to have won a few contests. His fi rst chapbook, When Least Expected, appeared early in 2006.

Ted Barnes, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, received his MFA in Painting from the University of Arkansas in 1979. He received his MA in Art Education in 1977 from Western Kentucky University and his BA in Studio Art from Ouachita Baptist University in 1972. He began his teaching career at Campbellsville College in 1979. For the past twenty-seven years, he has been a teacher and administrator at Ouachita Baptist University, Louisiana College, Georgetown College and the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. He is currently the Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts and Professor of Visual Art at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas. In 1994 he was a visiting scholar in art at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University, Oxford, England. From 1985 through 1986 he was an assistant art director for Halblieb and Moll & Associates, a full-service advertising agency in Louisville, Kentucky. He is an active artist and designer and a list of recent solo and group exhibitions include “Blame It on Cain: A Mid-Career Retrospective,” River Oaks Arts Center, Alexandria, LA; “Bangles, Jangles, Beeswax and Clay,” Ameen Gallery, Nicholls State University, Thibodeaux, LA; ”12th Annual Art with a Southern Drawl,” University of Mobile, Mobile, AL; “Gumbo Yumbo,” Tuska Gallery, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; “Personal Problems,” Orville Hanchey Gallery, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA.

Alan Berecka grew up in Stittville, New York. He left the Mohawk Valley to attend the University of Dallas and has become a transplanted Texan. He and his wife Alice have raised their two children in Sinton, Texas. He earns his keep as a reference librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. His poetry has appeared in such places as the Concho River Review, Texas Review, Christian Century, and previous issues of the Windhover. His first full collection, The Comic Flaw (NeoNuma Arts, Houston), is scheduled to be released at this year’s UMHB Writers’ Festival.

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Nathan Brown is a poet, musician, performer, and photographer from Norman, Oklahoma. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Oklahoma and teaches writing there as well. Mostly though, he travels now leading workshops and speaking in high schools and universities—as well as to community groups and organizations—on creativity, creative writing, and the need for readers not to give up on poetry. He has published fi ve books: Two Tables Over (2008), Nôt Exăctly Jōb (2007)—a fi nalist for the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award, Ashes Over the Southwest (2005), Suffer the Little Voices (2005)—a fi nalist for the 2006 Oklahoma Book Award, and Hobson’s Choice (2002). Website: <www.brownlines.com>.

Joe R. Christopher, Professor emeritus of English at Tarleton State University, read fi ve papers at the four academic conferences he attended in 2008—two papers at the Mythopoeic Society’s confer-ence. Four of the papers were on poetry by C. S. Lewis; the other on a novel by Diane Glancy. He also attended two writer’s conferences last year, including the UMHB Writer’s Festival, reading creative works at both. He loves being retired and having enough time to write at least more of what he has wanted to get done.

William Foy Coker has invested most of his creative energy in songwriting, the fruit of which can be found in over sixty songs listed with <www.CCLI.com>. This year, he has had poems published in The Cape Rock and the Petersburg Press. He also has several poems forthcoming at <www.brokenandbeautiful.org>. Infl uences include Nebraska poets, Ted Kooser, William Kloefkorn, and Art Homer, as well as Oregon poet, Peter Yeager. He has taught high school mathematics for 34 years. He and his wife, Karin, have three children and one daughter-in-law.

Chet Corey is a frequent contributor to Windhover. His poems have most recently appeared in The Broome Review, Country Roads (Loonfeather Press 2008), Sacred Journey, and Talking Stick. In September his prose poem, “Instructions to Yourself,” was included in a fusion performance of dance, music and spoken word at the Black Box Theatre. Poems are forthcoming in Hummingbird and Main Steet Rag. He is a Covenant Affi liate of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (La Crosse, WI), and lives in Bloomington, Minnesota.

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Barbara Crooker published her second book of poems, Line Dance (Word Press) in early 2008. New work appears in places as diverse as The Journal of American Medicine, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, Astropoetica, Christianity & Literature, Crannóg (Ireland), The Texas Review, and The Anglican Theological Review. She was a fi nalist in the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Contest and won the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize. Website: <www.barbaracrooker.com>.

Greg Garrett is the author of the novels Free Bird, Cycling, and Shame, the memoir Crossing Myself, and a number of nonfi ction books on narrative, faith, and culture, including The Gospel accord-ing to Hollywood and Stories from the Edge. A Professor of English at Baylor University, Greg teaches fi ction- and screenwriting, fi lm, American literature, and religion and literature. A frequent media guest on story, religion, culture, and politics, Greg has appeared on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, CBS Radio, The Bob Edwards Show, and in many other media outlets in the United States and abroad. Greg is a past winner of the William Faulkner Prize for Fiction and was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters in 2005. A featured blogger for The Christian Century at theotherjesus.com, Greg is also a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church.

Lyman Grant has taught at Austin Community College for 30 years and currently serves as Dean of Arts and Humanities. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Texas Observer, Texas Books in Review, Texas Humanist, Langdon Review, Concho River Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, and Windhover. Most recently, his poetry appeared in Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair: Best of the Texas Poetry Calendar.

Albert Haley is writer in residence and Associate Professor of English at Abilene Christian University. His poems have appeared in Poems & Plays, The Texas Observer, Christianity and Literature, Borderlands and other journals. His poem, “Barcelona,” was the fi rst place winner of the 2007 Rattle magazine poetry prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Mark E. Harden is a retired United States Army Chief Warrant Officer 3. He currently manages Veterans Affairs at Austin Community College, in Austin, Texas. He has written extensively about his military experiences. Mark currently resides in Georgetown, Texas, with his wife, Kathy.

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John Jenkinson earned his PhD at the University of North Texas and his MFA at Wichita State University. Author of two prize-winning chapbooks, he recently served as Milton Center Fellow in Poetry at Newman University. John’s poetry has won a variety of awards, and may be read in a wide variety of journals. His fi rst full-length collection, Rebekah Orders Lasagna, is available from Woodley Press, Washburn University. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Butler College, where he initiated and directs the Oil Hill Reading Series. He has also returned to an old interest, songwriting; as of this writing, John awaits the release of his fi rst CD, The Mystery of Love.

Helen Kwiatkowski is originally from Newark, New Jersey. She received a BA in Fine Arts from Upsala College and an MFA from East Texas State University (now Texas A&M at Commerce). After graduate school, Helen taught in the Art Department at Palomar College in San Marcos, California, and worked as freelance artist in and around San Diego. In 1989 she moved back to Texas and has been teaching art at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor since 1992. Helen has exhibited her paintings in various galleries & Art Centers throughout the United States, and she has been the Art Editor of Windhover since 2002.

Michael Hugh Lythgoe, an Indiana native, was educated at St. Louis University and The University of Notre Dame, where he studied political science, history and international relations. He retired from the USAF as a Lt. Col., with twenty-four years of service before earning an MFA at Bennington College. He has published two chapbooks and a collection of poetry, Holy Week (Xlibris.com). Recently, he read his poetry in Augusta, GA, at the Westobou Arts Festival, and was a featured poet at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston in 2007. He has three poems in the current issue of The Caribbean Writer (2008). Mike lives in Aiken, SC, with his wife, Louise. He is on the board of the Aiken Choral Society. He is a long time contributor to Windhover.

D.S. Martin is the author of two poetry collections: His new book Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and his chapbook So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press, 2007) which received an Award of Merit from The Word Guild. Both are available on his website: <www.dsmartin.ca>.

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William B. Montgomery was born and raised in the piney woods of East Texas and studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of New Mexico. He currently lives east of Austin on seventeen acres of land with his wife, several dogs, a few chickens, and some reptiles. A full time painter and printmaker, he occasionally takes time out from his studio in the historic section of Elgin to search out and photograph reptiles and amphibians in the U.S., Mexico, Central and South America, Europe and Asia. Montgomery is currently represented by Wally Workman Gallery in Austin, Texas, and and Valley House Gallery in Dallas.

Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom, forthcoming from WordTech Editions, and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press). Winner of the 2008 Janet B. McCabe Prize from RUMINATE magazine, Moore has also contributed poetry to Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, The MacGuffi n, Sou’Wester, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many others. Moore directs the Writing Center at Cedarville University in Ohio. Website: <www.julielmoore.com>.

Angela O’Donnell teaches English, Creative Writing, and American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City where she also serves as Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. A former resident of Baltimore, O’Donnell taught at Loyola College for 18 years before moving to New York. Her chapbook, Mine, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2007. A second chapbook, Waiting for Ecstasy, and a full-length collection of poems, Moving House, are forthcoming from Franciscan and Word Presses, respectively, in 2009. Her poems have appeared in America, First Things, Christian Century, Comstock Review, RUNES, Xavier Review, The Cresset, Pedestal Magazine.com, Die-Cast Garden.com, Windhover, and other journals. She has been selected as a fi nalist for the Foley Poetry Award , the Elixir First Book Award, and the Mulberry Poet’s & Writer’s Award.

Brady Peterson has taught rhetoric for the past ten years. Before that he built houses. Between the spaces he writes. He writes essays, poems, a novel he’s been working on for years, and speeches. His poems have appeared in Windhover, New Texas, Nerve Cowboy, Boston Literary Magazine, and Heartlodge. He has fi ve grown daughters and is married to Barbara. Together the six of them do their best to work him into shape.

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Daniel Polikoff is the author of two collections of poetry: Dragon Ship (Tebot Bach, 2007) and The Hands of Stars (Confl ux Press, 2008). His poems and translations have been published in over fi fty journals, including Nimrod, Gulf Coast, The Literary Review, and The Southern Humanities Review. Daniel is currently completing a book titled Rilke: A Soul History. He resides in Mill Valley, California, with his wife and two children.

Carolyn Luke Reding is currently serving her second term as Vice-President and Program Chair of the Austin Poetry Society. She continues her studies at the Seminary of the Southwest. Her poem ’Diffusion’ was nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Prize. In October 2008, she was nominated to be considered for the next Texas State Poet Laureate.

Tony Reevy is the Senior Associate Director of the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a graduate of North Carolina State University, UNC-Chapel Hill and Miami University. He is a David P. Morgan Award winner (2006) and a Pushcart Prize nominee. His previous publications include poetry, non-fi ction and short fi ction. His poems are anthologized in Earth and Soul: An Anthology of North Carolina Poetry, Poets for Peace: A Collection, and many others. His books/chapbooks are Ghost Train!: American Railroad Ghost Legends, A Directory of North Carolina’s Railroad Structures (with Art Peterson and Sonny Dowdy), Green Cove Stop, Magdalena and Lightning in Wartime. He resides in Durham, North Carolina, with wife, Caroline Weaver, and children Lindley and Ian.

D. Audell Shelburne is the general editor of Windhover and director of the Writers’ Festival at UMHB, where he is also a professor and chair of the Department of English. He is an assistant textual editor on the verse letters volume of the Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (forthcoming someday). He has published poems in Borderlands and a few lesser known publications. Audell and Theresa have seven children: Nick, Will, Peter, Thomas, Katherine, Megan, and David.

Donna Stjerna is a life-long musician and for the last thirteen years, a member of the folk duo Still on the Hill. Together with her partner, Kelly Mulhollan, they travel coast to coast and throughout Europe and have become well known to followers of the “folk world.” A very late bloomer, she really didn’t start writing her own songs before the formation of Still on the Hill, but now has authored some six hundred songs. Occasionally one of her lyrics crosses that mysterious line that separates lyrics and poetry.

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Larry D. Thomas, a longtime contributor of poetry to Windhover, has published nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which is New and Selected Poems (Texas Christian University Press, March 2008). His tenth poetry collection, The Circus, is forthcoming as an e-chapbook from Right Hand Pointing in early 2009. His poetry books have won numerous awards, including two Texas Review Poetry Prizes (2001 and 2004), the 2003 Western Heritage Award (National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum), a Poet’s Prize nomination (Nicholas Roerich Museum), and three Spur Award Finalist citations (Western Writers of America). Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Mr. Thomas was appointed by the Texas Legislature as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. Website: <www.larrydthomas.com>.

John H. Timmerman is a Professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of twenty-two books, and many creative nonfi ction essays and short stories in such journals as Texas Review, Mars Hill Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and others.

William Kelley Woolfi tt teaches writing at Penn State. He also serves as a summer camp counselor in New Hampshire. He tells us he’s hiked a thousand miles of the Appalachian Trail . His poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Poetry International, Shenandoah, North Dakota Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, Weber Studies, and Sycamore Review.

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THE WRITERS’ FESTIVAL2009

sponsored by

WINDHOVER: A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE

and

UNIVERSITY OF MARY HARDIN-BAYLOR

January 7-10, 2009

UMHB CampusBelton, Texas

PoetryJeanne Murray Walker

Open Mic and Coffee HouseWednesday, January 7th at 7:00

KEYNOTE ADDRESSThursday, January 8th at 7:00

The Seventh Annual George Nixon Memorial LectureJeanne Murray Walker

ConcertFriday, January 9th at 7:30Still on the HillDonna StjernaKeyy Mulhollan

For more information, visit:http://library.umhb.edu/shelburne/writersfestival.html

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WINDHOVER: A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

Individual copies of the Windhover may be purchased for $15 (which includes shipping and handling). The journal is typically unveiled each year at the Writers’ Festival in early January at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. Discounts for multiple copies may be negotiated (generally 20% discount for orders of 5 or more). Back issues may be purchased for $8 (limited supply). Please make checks payable to Windhover and mail requests (including shipping address) to the address below.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Windhover is devoted to promoting writers and literature with a Christian perspective. The journal accepts a broad defi nition of that perspective while remaining committed to its identity as a journal of Christian literature.

The journal accepts unsolicited submissions of poetry, short fi c-tion, non-fi ction, and creative non-fi ction. Please send no more than four poems per issue. Items longer than 3,000 words (approximately 10 double-spaced pages) are not ordinarily considered.

The editorial team generally reads only during early summer.

Final decisions will be made by August 1st. Please include a stamped postcard for acknowledgement. Manuscripts will be recycled and will not be returned. Manuscripts received after June 1st will be considered for the next annual issue. We do not accept submissions via email.

Audell ShelburneWindhover/Dept. of EnglishUMHB Box 8008900 College StreetBelton, TX 76513

WindhoverA Journal of Christian Literature

Volume 13 • January 2009

POETRYLarry D. Thomas

Donna StjernaAngela O’Donnell

Alan BereckaDaniel PolikoffBrady PetersonNathan Brown

Barbara CrookerD. S. MartinAlbert Haley

John Jenkinson

Lyman GrantMichael H. LythgoeWilliam Foy Coker

Julie L. MooreWilliam Kelley Woolfi tt

Mark E. HardenChet Corey

John AlexandersonCarolyn Luke Reding

Tony Reevy

PROSEGreg Garrett John H. Timmerman

REVIEWSJoe R. Christopher Michael H. Lythgoe

ARTWORKTed Barnes William B. Montgomery