We must live closer to the dead. Why should anyone fear them? Silence is the trophy of the peaceful. Bursting open are Heaven’s walls. The contented, the contentious, the wretched among us, it is done for you, you whose bones are no longer even grey. I stand not on soil but on decomposed sighs turned sturdy root.

Mother, babe, architect, Mayor. How can death be proud? Pride is for those still moving and aching and naming. It is ours, with our machinations and grasping love, burdened with dis-eased desire for living and remembering.

And for what? Shrubs here are searingly red and gold, and the pond’s surface provocatively placid — November’s witnesses to planetary jitteriness. Physics is against us but death, we are its glad valentine, full of grace.


Grace Seol
November 2013

I don’t think enough people go to confession nowadays
To ponder what a devastatingly awkward encounter it makes
between a young girl with a busy body and a busier mind
and a holy old man who is probably bored of everyone’s sins.
Candle lights, the sweetly gleaming faces of Saint Anthony,
the sloping porcelain forehead of Mary –
ah, among them, to do penance, to reconcile with God!
(And what a verb — to reconcile! –
as if we are lovers who have quarreled!)
It is Advent and I am waiting for love’s arrival
with prioritized lists that I agonized over.
My mom is always complaining that I don’t call her enough;
I’ll say, Father, I have been neglectful of those i love most.
As for the troubles that have kept me up at night, I’ll say,
Father, I have not been chaste.
The thin Franciscan who heard me, his efficiency
exceeding mine with his hands open over me, performed:
“I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
I said Amen after him –
the economy of Grace flummoxes me every time.
The phone rang soon after; “your daughter is
sinless,” I chirped, “as of 40 minutes ago.”
“The only one in our family,” she said.




Grace Seol / December 2013

Out of lust, out of bargaining,
there is this love, and you and me.
I wield that word like a toy sword –
waving that plastic and menacing thing
like the dance of a stomping child.
I love you, I whisper it like
a chant in an archaic tongue, committed to memory,
half-hoping for divine intercession.
I love you to make sense of the tragedy
of your saying it back to me.
I love you as Dorian gazes at his reflection,
I love you as Eve drapes leaves over her breasts,
I love you as a pilgrim embarks at night
with a tired horse and empty pockets.

Grace Seol
3/11/2014