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Then was the grown-up world of tall decision, Its beauty of late nights denied a child; World of bewildering gifts, and strange derision, Alien alike whether it frowned or smiled, Yet your least wish was governed by its laws. The landscape and the weather both were odd, Exploding with effects that hid a cause Serene and lonely as the Will of God. Recall it: peopled by an august race, Immune to the passions that attack the young, And knowing all. There every commonplace Must be translated from a marvellous tongue. Now is the world of grandeur dwindled, shrunk To what the stupidest can understand. The shabby treasures of an exile’s trunk Include no passport to that wonderland, Though you are told you are a citizen. The scenery is changed, the climate dull; The fateful masks are faces, gods are men; Most nights are long and few are magical. But there are strangers even here: their speech Is rich in barbarous mystery, their ways Are private, who live wholly beyond reach, Admired and feared, though none of us obeys Their foreign rule. No dictators, and yet Strong utterly. While we, with pity wrung For what they must do, suffer, learn, forget, Feel shy when we approach them. They are young.

Then it was always for now, later for later. And then years of now passed, and it grew later and later. Trapped in the shrinking chocolate box the confused sardine was unhappy. It leapt, and banged its head again. And afterward they said shall we repeat the experiment. And it said later for that.

joy in the day's being done, however clumsily, and in the ticked-off lists, the packages nestling together, no one home waiting for dinner, for you, no one impatient for your touch or kind words to salve what nightly rises like heartburn, the ghost-lump feeling that one is really as alone as one had feared. One isn't, not really. Not really. Joy to see over the strip mall darkening right on schedule a neon-proof pink sunset flaring like the roof of a cat's mouth, cleanly ribbed, the clouds laddering up and lit as if by a match struck somewhere in the throat much deeper down.

No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians. Desire will not save the morality of God. If he created beings able to choose between good and evil, And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity, Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures, Which would find its explanation only by assuming The existence of an archetypal Paradise And a pre-human downfall so grave That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.

from locusts and wild honey On a lesser diet than that of the wretched rests a prophecy: some of us come to prepare. I stood before my god, at a foreign altar, and promised to guide you; me, with my heretic theology. I practice the ways passed to me by descendants of followers of a wild man: followers in the desert downwind of his musk, listening to him confess himself unfit to loose latchets on shoes; they believed his words holy, ignored bits of insect wing in his beard. And then, he told them of a dove that no one else could see. I have learned to retain my head while speaking truth. rite of the baptism of children Do I reject the glamor of evil? I do. You are creation — the same after water and after the Holy Spirit, only now you see the door to life and unto the Kingdom of God. Do not feel the need of any claimant to royal priesthood. Some ancient, calling himself Peter, must have been in his cups when he wrote that ish. The nerve! You were cleansed with water by power of the Word. Sign of the Cross? Phooey! There is no miracle in an instrument of death. See: Martin Luther, theses 5, 16, 28, and 95. God made no symbols; people did, et cetera. some thoughts on caterina benincasa Not much older than you when she first saw the Christ — seated in glory with few of His disciples — who gave her many gifts: a consummate marriage by way of His foreskin; the blesséd stigmata; and her head as a bag of rose petals. To “build a cell inside your mind,” a cell of self-knowledge, is good advice, my child. The Christ commanded her to open the eye of her intellect and gaze into Him. This made her secularly gifted, a power broker. Read her correspondence, yes, the letters of a lunatic diplomat but heeded, virtuous sweet amorous Word of God. ephphatha rite He sighed . All power in heaven and in earth is. Be opened. Hear and speak the truth but tell no one how. Superior to the purifications of Old Law was that water. Be opened, daughter. All power in heaven and earth is. No questions. Be opened. Hold fast to my teachings, not those of stewards but my words. Seek you first, girl, the kingdom of my love, with all your mind. All your mind. Do not forget your mind. You are mine. Be opened. Power! Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness. All power in heaven and in earth is given me. Be opened. coda patrinalis In the land of mama there is a cathedral, the cathedral of the Holy Spirit. Inside is an icon, an image of Theotokos. Once old enough to go solo, after an age of discernment is reached, perhaps in passing by, go there. Make your way up the nave and to the right; there you will find her looking at you, babe in arm, tired and anemic as usual. Bless her with a kiss and make her holy. Bless the babe, too, if feeling generous. Use a chair if needed. It is a painting. Simple miracles were made on a lesser diet than that of the wretched.

Blood to babe to father’s laden table. Dance, said the father, show us your grace. Whose tattered cotton whose weary gristle, heads duly shriven, wrenched in complaint? Cleft so a heart works without wanting, summoned to pleasure, free to pick dates. Curve into cursive, praxis to ashes. What reveler considers the number of plates?

A true friend is one soul in two bodies. —Aristotle Kant says, transcendental idealism. In Aquinas, we exist apart from bodies but only on Thursdays when his famous ox flies by the window wiser at Cologne where Albertus Magnus, his real name, appoints Aquinas to magister studentium, master of students. Aquinas is petrified but says yes. He feels his soul sailing out of his head floating near the roof where a blue ox wings by. On Wednesday, two bodies are one soul waking at sunrise thanks to the pineal gland of Descartes, who thinks this node in the brain is a tiny sugar cone or salted peanut, the seat of the soul while Aristotle points to the chopping ax as a teleology as if the ax were a living, breathing person which it isn’t. Heraclitus, air and fire while Aquinas objects, no not an ax but ox. If you’re a bird or soul I am only one mile from the sea. If you are a soul in two bodies life is more complex and we must labor twice the field of sorrow after sleep, bath, and a glass as Aquinas whispers,the things we love tell us who we are

You can get there from here, though there’s no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you’ve never been. Try this: head south on Mississippi 49, one- by-one mile markers ticking off another minute of your life. Follow this to its natural conclusion—dead end at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches in a sky threatening rain. Cross over the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried terrain of the past. Bring only what you must carry—tome of memory, its random blank pages. On the dock where you board the boat for Ship Island, someone will take your picture: the photograph—who you were— will be waiting when you return.

It is hard even to admit this theory of hats, that to wear The faithless one brimmed tightly over the eyes— The featherless and discreet one, a hat with a secret code That says,To spoil the child is to fatten the serpent— To wear that hat (imperfectly as a crow’s crown) against the sun Is to bear the ruins of the unborn into our hearts— He, shouting at the brunt of trees; She, shifting like a seer to restore them. It is hard to know happiness with a hat like that. Or to forget the pangs sung with such burly impatience, Or to heal the blurred things and soft hurts. Even the blind self becomes a dervish, what with the torsion And the far-off vita nuova like a new virus or virtuoso, What with the tussles and old, pure-lit suppressions. Then to be surprised by joy: Like the last rain of summer, The big, spiraling, wounded animal of rain With no place to turn, drumming the brown grass, Rain falling without meaning, but perfectly faithful, Into the petals of wind and the unopened roots— Such tenderness looked to, like love, but unquestioned. Then some afternoon with the sky lifting off again, She will come to sit on the porch like a dark sparrow And let the sun creep slowly onto her hair And grow old and wonder about the balance of things. And he beside her, sitting, too, distracted in the sun for hours, But all the same, both of them, at last, so much warmer.

“But there were times when you offered your consent with older men. You chose them, & you were not afraid. Why not?” You don’t know the true success of survival till you’ve experienced the adrenaline of a too-close death. What is there to fear when you’ve licked the edge? It is going to be an oppressively hot summer, the New York Post says, but I’ve got a few of my own stowed away, enough to occupy a foreign desert. There was one summer, his name was Tito and my sisters still say his name just like that, “Tee-toww,” the O a benchmark in the bottom of the jaw. I was just 12 but the gaze itself made me a flame, so no one could tell, I guess, or no one would tell. He was the kind of heavy swelter that had the whole block at mercy, everyone’s connect to whatever they needed, which was much and in bulk. Power is a switch that yokes me up at the waist — I was young & enamored by this pattern of men who shouldn’t want me but would risk day to touch the stark chant of me. Each time, I imagined a witchcraft enveloping the bone. I remember, once, at some low hour in the trough* of that summer — my mouth a voyaging boat, Tito’s spine a current of illicit knots, his hand a spindle on the back of my coarse head — he looks down at me, & moans out “Who the fuck are you?” I say, and the answer is always the same thereafter: nobody, who are you? *Okay, in any event, Elizabeth and I were in the pool, swimming and playing.