Matters for You Alone is a spiritual exploration of friendship: its shapes and duties, stresses and blames—and its absolute necessity. The book takes its title from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence, as it strives to interpret everyday encounters and events—the domestic, the mundane—in light of the eternal.
Powerful and powerless—made perfect in weakness—the speaker in these poems is fractured and dazzling, abject and hurried, courageous and fallen, you and me. At times playful, at others deadly serious, these poems ask important questions about our friends. What is the lifespan of a friendship and how might we celebrate its glories? How have our friends made us who we are? “As Seen in Frescoes Now Effaced” says it this way: “We’re taught to love / by someone—a series of them— // each seeking a brief shelter / as the spirit searches / for more capacious / seas—.”
A friend holds a special status—not exactly family, but often with deeper resonances of meaning and responsibility, and especially, choice. When friendships go wrong, how can we mend and heal? As “way leads on to way, ” how can forgiveness hold the sacred memory of others and their indelible marks on us? This book is for anyone who wants to reflect on the people in our lives from whom we’ve received instruction, correction, inspiration, and joy.
Table of Content
CONTENTS
Moonstone, Tiger’s Eye
I
If You Prefer Not to Fill Out the Visitor Card
Pilgrim Crossing
The Speck
Paper Lanterns Blowing in the Trees
An Easier Hospitality
In the Scroll of the Book
Vanishing Lake
The Amulet
As Seen in Frescoes Now Effaced
Proved by the Sparrow
First-Class Relics
Friend Shift
Fine Print
Teach Us to Number Our Days
Museum of Adult Life
Tidal Mouth
Sunset 4:14
Mother Dream with Summer and Winter
& then a Wind Came
Love Is the Crooked Thing
Condolence Note
Vespers
In the Main
Gently Used
Blurred Edge
Dream with Winnowing Fork
Shake the Dust
Veil Torn in Two
II
Dream of Being Alive
Ninety-Nine Stories of Love
Quartzes Formed in Hidden Chambers
Pilgrim Bridge
I’d Be in Right Relation with the Wine
Friend with Onionskin
Silent Retreat
Love (3)
Some Other Blaze in Us
Quantum Entanglement
Canticle with Love Entire its Shape
Star-Dogged Moon
On Seeing Old Skis in the Garage
Via Negativa
Beginner Landscape
Connective Tissue
In Truth
On the Sixth Day
Hidden Entry
Cloak of Kindness
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the author
Leslie Williams is the author of the award-winning poetry collections Success of the Seed Plants and Even the Dark. Her poems appear widely in magazines including America, Liberties, Image, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Christian Century, and Poetry. Leslie has received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, among other honors. She is a practicing Episcopalian and trained spiritual director who lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
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