Whether today’s trail is a shortcut through the week or not, the scraps of fabric are blazes, trail markers, pieces of cloth snagged and caught like evidence left behind, signaling that the story went along this path, marking the twists and turns from joy to a supper to a garden, passing through a midnight courtyard to a hill named for a skull to a tomb.
Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Poetry International, and elsewhere. Delinquent Palaces, released by Northwestern University Press in April 2015, is her debut collection of poems.
What if, maybe starting with those 10 Commandments, we saw the rules we live by not so much as boundaries and walls to protect us, but as windows into the world? As ways of structuring awareness. Openings through which we look at more and more of the life we’ve been given together on this earth and ask what love would require of us in all of it.