Jacob’s Ladder
By Poetry Issue 91
Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely God is present in this place, and I did not know it!” Shaken, he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.” …
Read MoreCandy and Copenhagen: Encountering the Art of Jonathan Castellino
By Essay Issue 86
The role or purpose of art in our lives is to serve as a reminder. We have a sense that the world of perception is illusive and created. Through the acceptance of the gifts of beauty we feel that we are able to draw back the veil cast over our senses, if only briefly, and…
Read MoreCredo
By Essay Issue 55
Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…
Read MoreIn Cutaway
By Poetry Issue 75
Stands me, though it could be any of us, sliced open, scalp to instep, en pointe in formaldehyde inside a glass case like some macabre Houdini stunt. This may be a fin-de-siècle end-of-pier show, a sicko’s private gallery, a future museum of mortality—I’d be the last to know: dutiful sentry in cross-section, everlasting witness to…
Read MoreThe Track in the Wilderness
By Poetry Issue 78
What is this world but the absence of God, his withdrawal, his distance (which we call space), his waiting (which we call time), his footprint (which we call beauty)? God could only create the world by withdrawing from it (otherwise there would be nothing but God), or by remaining in the form of absence, hiddenness,…
Read MoreAbsence Blooming
By Poetry Issue 80
This winter is a bear in my garden: it sharpens its claws against the oak and snuffs through topsoil to pry loose the hidden bulb. I traced its path in window frost, how the soft pad of its heel pressed me like a child inside the womb until the swift puncture of claw. I breathed…
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