Revelation
March 16, 2018I am ten, sitting on your sofa.
I watch as you paint and talk.
Your voice is a swallow,
which sometimes loops through the Andes,
DiaBLOGue
After Her Stroke
March 16, 2018Above this cold chair
they say vegetable. Voices like calves
bawling for their mother’s teats.
I think yellow squash, summer,
Finding Place
March 16, 2018A fire in the pasture undulates
of blue and white and yellow flower,
a fire like a snake, it would seem, iridescent
Runaway
March 16, 2018A bus token jingles
against the nickels and dimes
in the pocket of his Pendleton coat
as he lingers at the door
Mass Transit Madonna
March 16, 2018She looks around wondering if
The driver remembers her stop.
She does not speak to me
But bends her white neck
Perplexed by the Revelator’s Heaven
March 16, 2018Aren’t leaves crumbling against the edge
of autumn, the fibrous tangle
of the lesser shrew’s heart, and a prophet curled
in the belly of night, shaking like a reed fragile enough?
Fierce Joy and Proof That It Happened
March 16, 2018In my CD collection is a set of two semi-bootlegged discs, their cases held together with a rubber band, each marked La Pietà, 1/21/01 in permanent marker. The recording itself is perfectly legal; I arranged for it with an ebullient phone contact at NPR’s “Performance Today,” along with recordings of several other concerts on the “Chamber Music in Historic Sites” schedule that season. That I ended up with a copy of it is sheer luck, or divine intervention, or chutzpah. The music is a French-Canadian all-girl band, playing music written for young women, and it is my favorite CD.
Undie Running on the Line between Church and State
March 16, 2018They were wearing next to nothing. Thongs, boy-shorts, string bikinis. A lacy Victoria’s Secret red and black nightgown seemed downright conservative. Pro-gay slogans—“Marriage Equality!” and “Down with Prop 8!”—were plastered on chests, legs, butt cheeks, cheeks. “Judge not lest ye be judged” read one billboard/lower back, scrawled in what might have been red lipstick. Tattoo ink had rendered many of these mostly twenty- and thirty something-year-old bodies more permanent canvases.
Our Dinner with Levi Peterson
March 16, 2018Levi Savage Peterson, the beloved and controversial Mormon writer, throws a quietly skeptical glance over his menu in a posh Palo Alto nouveaux-Middle Eastern restaurant on a recent evening in early June 2011. My partner, Russell A. Berman, of Stanford University, president of the Modern Language Association, and I had invited Peterson to speak about his work and his contributions as a “literary intellectual” in the American public sphere.
(Re)Interpreting Early Mormon Thought: Synthesizing Joseph Smith’s Theology and the Process of Religion Formation
March 16, 2018Nine months after Joseph Smith and his brother were assassinated by an angry mob in June 1844, Parley P. Pratt published a proclamation addressed to the Church’s large and dispersed membership to assure them that all was well. In doing so, he sought to accomplish two things: first, to praise Smith’s legacy as the found ing prophet of a movement that had attracted thousands of converts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean; and second, to insist on the necessity of the Quorum of the Twelve’s institutional leadership—a role that meant not only continuing, but fulfilling and ex tending, Smith’s religious vision. “The chaos of materials prepared by [Smith] must now be placed in order in the building,” he wrote. “The laws revealed by him must now be administered in all their strictness and beauty. The measure commenced by him must now be carried into successful operation.”