A shape less recognizable each week, A purpose more obscure.                  —Philip Larkin, “Church Going”

In spite of fundamentalists, it keeps on being true, what Larkin said. I’m walking through with my Jewish daughter and her three boys, the stone and glass saying not a word to make any of us believe, but I’m seeing the church I grew up with, shadowed like this to let the glitter in. Dignity’s what held me then and almost makes a Christian of me now, again: God multiplying as he

enters through the glass, amusing himself. We trace the transept, nave, and choir, walking the sign of the cross, even the boys, who don’t know what it means. We lift our eyes to the clerestory a hundred thousand workers gave their backs to put there, to feed their families, and only slightly, if at all, I’d guess, to honor God. The stones went up. The wheel that pulled each one to greater heights was raised again, and left

up there at last, too high to bring it down, the mind that glorious in its space, mathematical in its hopes. It’s brought us here. The five of us walk plaque to plaque, to each candle-lit niche for each dead saint. A prayer, I think, is the least I can do: I pray to Larkin’s poem, to gargoyle waterspouts, to all the things that jut, that disagree, disrupt. I pray to buttresses that launch off wildly from the side and land.

The dead are disorderly. If they rot, worms; if cremated, a waste of smoke. Maybe rot is better. For where does fire-energy go? I see energy transferred to worms and so on. But fire speeds up molecules, then they slow down. Worms can sometimes turn into winged things. Good grief, I'm here on the dock thinking how best to be dead!

Anemone - forsaken

The Anemone gets its name from the greek ánemos, meaning 'wind', combined with the feminine suffix -ōnē.

According to legend, Anemone was a beautiful nymph attending to the court of Chloris, the goddess of flowers. Zephyr, the western wind and husband to Chloris, fell in love with her. In a fit of jealous rage, Chloris exiled Anemone. She pined after Zephyr, eventually dying of a broken heart.

The grieving Zephyr begged Aphrodite to turn his lover's body into a flower which would always return to life at the start of spring, but once she did he quickly lost interest. Anemone was left to the clumsy and unwanted caresses of Boreas, the northern wind. He forced open her blossoms and caused her to fade.

There is a more popular legend that says the anemone came into existence when Aphrodite sprinkled nectar on the blood of Adonis after he got killed by a boar, but this is a legend about the Adonis annua, which looks very similar to the Anemone.