~   I wish I had not taken so many shortcuts. It’s the winding journey that leads everywhere.

~   All this saving of time, and I still only have now.

~   You may think it’s difficult taking back your words, …try taking back your silence.

~   The thrust of it is: the soul is built up through mercy and truth, and torn down by resentment.

~   There are 59 million people in the world who are 68, and every one of them understands that by this age, change is a long shot, and should it come, it will come from the inside.

~   My sudden cry of, hallelujah! startled everyone in the Dollar Store.

~   After years of shedding the trinkets of faith — faith found me.

~   Hope resembles Covid, in that it resists extermination.

~   And yet, and yet, I look at the trembling sea, radiant orange from a sinking sun, and I want to wrap my legs around it. Hopeless, like many other desires.

~   So many things can fill the heart. But nothing, it seems, fills it completely.

~   Consciousness of the abyss is also an engine of conversion.

~   Cynicism is a cranky old man with a full bladder, and yet, as appealing as Louise in that crochet halter top.

~   Speaking of romance, O, such a notion I had burdened myself with: that I needed no one to show me who I am.

~   Matter gives way, opacity wears out, transparency is the mystery.

~   As a lifelong skeptic, I live in fear of clarity. When clarity comes, I live in fear of doubt. When in doubt, I practice replacing the word “void” with “God,” over and over again. As soon as it sticks, the skeptic returns.

~   Infatuation gives way, passion wears out, intimacy is the mystery.

~   When the thief stole my watch it was as if he’d severed my wrist. I scolded myself for being that attached to possessions. Yet now I can’t seem to stop dividing the world into upright citizens and thieves.

~   When I demanded consideration for my years of sacrifice, God said, “My son, you may be confusing me with an investment broker.”

~   I pleaded, O Lord, help me to know my faults. The Lord asked, “Tell me, of what faults do you accuse others?”

~   To the conspirators, as to the Fundamentalists, there is an obvious reason for everything.

~   The calendars of establishment leftists and institutional liberals boast of endless conferences.

~   The shadow is darkest when there’s just you holding a candle. Call to your side others with candles.

~   I asked the Divine Mother if there was anything greater than joy, She said, “Nothing, other than finding its source.” Then I asked, is there anything greater than finding its source? She said, “Nothing, except being its cause in another.”

~   I spent 25 years working at a homeless shelter, every day I was amazed that no one said, “What’s that boy doing working at a homeless shelter?”

~   If you’re lucky, the poem will wait for the noise in your head to clear so you can grapple with a few short lines that say what they mean. If you are even luckier, you will receive a grant, the condition of which is to leave off writing poetry.

~   I renounced the world. Then someone picked up what I renounced. Then I refined my renunciation. It goes on like this.

~   God, while I have your ear, tell me, how in the world will I shoulder all this weight? God said, “Well, in the first place, you don’t have to pick it up.”

~   That’s when I heard myself, for the second time, cry, hallelujah!

 

Now here is a common story that happens in early October, on a clear, gorgeous Saturday, when whole neighbourhoods are out in their yards, stowing patio furniture, gardening tools, mowers, raking leaves into piles,

everyone, seemingly, pitching in, except for an adolescent son, lying on the deck, dreaming, occasionally teasing the cat with string and a small rubber ball, lost in a far place, a cat universe, who knows…

and a father who shouts to the son, Move! and the son who makes a pretense of rising, of lifting himself away from his play, but never quite getting to his feet, never getting to his chore,

never quite listening to the father who is bent to get fall clean-up done before the weather changes, before the snow comes, already, frost in the air,

the poplars and birch, once beautiful in their yellows and golds and touches of crimson, now standing naked, corpse-like, and ready for winter — and again the father yells at the son, Move! I said Move!

Do you recognize this story? the way the son looks at the father in affected confusion, as though the father is speaking Latin, the son again looking away, as though some breezy, heedless force is calling for aimless musing of such requests — and the father, shouting, echoing, as though to penetrate that force.

Memory is a pile of leaves, you can bury anything there, pain, shame — an image of a father, enraged, breaking a branch over the trunk of a tree, in the manner of a threat, an instant failure, a dismal spectacle,

and the image of a son, who lowers his eyes and picks up the rake, a final image of a father who turns to hide his face, a pulpy thing, a fading flush of blood — I’m sorry! — drop them in, cover them over with leaves,

until decades later, the grey-headed father, culling papers in his office, and a picture drops from the pile, of a teenage boy, running, laughing, launching himself into a pile of leaves, and a father, watching from the back deck — something like joy,

happy, just the way some stories can end, with the image of a father, sitting in a pile of papers and memories, his creased and stubbled face, smiling, his lined eyes, wet, and long forgiven.