Christian Wiman

We lived in the long intolerable called God. We seemed happy. I don’t mean content I mean heroin happy, donkey dentures, I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture I mean to be mean. Dear Lord forgive the love I have for you and your fervent servants. I have so long sojourned Lord among the mild ironies and tolerable gods that what comes first to mind when I’m of a mind to witness is muriatic acid eating through the veins of one whose pains were so great she wanted only out, Lord, out. She too worshipped you. She too popped her little pill of soul. Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone is that a prayer that’s every instance answered? I remember one Wednesday witness told of a time his smack-freaked friends lashed him to the back of a Brahman bull that bucked and shook until like great bleeding wings the man’s collarbones exploded out of his skin. Long pause. “It was then,” the man said, “right then…” Yes. And how long before that man- turned-deacon-turned-scourge-of-sin began his ruinous and (one would guess) Holy Spirit-less affair? At what point did this poem abandon even the pretense of prayer? Imagine a man alive in the long intolerable time made of nothing but rut and rot, a wormward gaze even to his days’ sudden heavens. There is the suffering existence answers: it carves from cheeks and choices the faces we in fact are; and there is the suffering of primal silence, which seeps and drifts like a long fog that when it lifts leaves nothing but the same poor sod. Dear God—

This inwardness, this ice, this wide boreal whiteness into which he's come with a crawling sort of care for the sky's severer blue, the edge on the air, trusting his own lightness and the feel as feeling goes; this discipline, this glaze, this cold opacity of days begins to crack. No marks, not one scar, no sign of where they are, these weaknesses rumoring through, growing loud if he stays, louder if he turns back. Nothing to do but move. Nowhere to go but on, to creep, and breathe, and learn a blue beyond belief, an air too sharp to pause, this distance, this burn, this element of flaws that winces as it gives. Nothing to do but live. Nowhere to be but gone.

Brachest, she called it, gentling grease over blanching yolks with an expertise honed from three decades of dawns at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine, where even the oldest in the old men's booth swore as if it were scripture truth they'd never had a breakfast better, rapping a glass sharply to get her attention when it went sorrowing so far into some simple thing— the jangly door or a crusted pan, the wall clock's black, hitchy hands— that she would startle, blink, then grin as if discovering them all again. Who remembers now when one died the space that he had occupied went unfilled for a day, then two, three, until she unceremoniously plunked plates down in the wrong places and stared their wronged faces back to banter she could hardly follow. Unmarried, childless, homely, "slow," she knew coffee cut with chamomile kept the grocer Paul's ulcer cool, yarrow in gravy eased the islands of lesions in Larry Borwick's hands, and when some nightlong nameless urgency sent him seeking human company Brother Tom needed hash browns with cheese. She knew to nod at the litany of cities the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past, to laugh when the hunters asked if she'd pray for them or for the quail they went laughing off to kill, and then—envisioning one rising so fast it seemed the sun tugged at it—to do exactly that. Who remembers where they all sat: crook-backed builders, drought-faced farmers, VF'ers muttering through their wars, night-shift roughnecks so caked in black it seemed they made their way back every morning from the dead. Who remembers one word they said? The Longhorn Diner's long torn down, the gin and feedlots gone, the town itself now nothing but a name at which some bored boy has taken aim, every letter light-pierced and partial. Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill, I picture you one dime-bright dawn grown even brighter now for being gone bustling amid the formica and chrome of that small house we both called home during the spring that was your last. All stories stop: once more you're lost in something I can merely see: steam spiriting out of black  coffee, the scorched pores of toast, a bowl of apple butter like edible soil, bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass, my plate's gleaming, teeming emptiness.

A town so flat a grave's a hill, A dusk the color of beer. A row of schooldesks shadows fill, A row of houses near. A courthouse spreading to its lawn, A bank clock's lingering heat. A gleam of storefronts not quite gone, A courthouse in the street. A different element, almost, A dry creek brimming black. A light to lure the darkness close, A light to keep it back. A time so still a heart's a sound, A moon the color of skin. A pumpjack bowing to the ground, Again, again, again.

I tell you it's a bitch existence some Sundays and it's no good pretending you don't have to pretend, don't have to hitch up those gluefutured nags Hope and Help and whip the sorry chariot of yourself toward whatever hell your heaven is on days like these. I tell you it takes some hunger heaven itself won't slake to be so twitchingly intent on the pretty organist's pedaling, so lizardly alert to the curvelessness of her choir robe. Here it comes, brothers and sisters, the confession of sins, hominy hominy, dipstick doxology, one more churchcurdled hymn we don't so much sing as haunt: grounded altos, gear-grinding tenors, two score and ten gently bewildered men lip-synching along. You're up, Pastor. Bring on the unthunder. Some trickle-piss tangent to reality. Some bit of the Gospel grueling out of you. I tell you sometimes mercy means nothing but release from this homiletic hologram, a little fleshstep sideways, as it were, setting passion on autopilot (as if it weren't!) to gaze out in peace at your peaceless parishioners: boozeglazes and facelifts, bad mortgages, bored marriages, a masonry of faces at once specific and generic, and here and there that rapt famished look that leaps from person to person, year to year, like a holy flu. All these little crevices into which you've crawled like a chubby plumber with useless tools: Here, have a verse for your wife's death. Here, have a death for your life's curse. I tell you some Sundays even the children's sermon — maybe especially this — sharks your gut like a bite of tin some beer-guzzling goat either drunkenly or mistakenly decides to sample. I know what you're thinking. Christ's in this. He'll get to it, the old cunner, somewhere somehow there's the miracle meat, the aurora borealis blood, every last atom compacted to a grave and the one thing that every man must lose to save. Well, friends, I'm here to tell you two things today. First, though this is not, for me, one of those bilious abrading days, though in fact I stand before you in a rage of faith and have all good hope that you will all go help untold souls back into their bodies, ease the annihilating No above which they float, the truth is our only savior is failure. Which brings me to the second thing: that goat. It was real. It is, as is usually the case, the displacement of agency that is the lie. It was long ago, Mexico, my demon days: It was a wager whose stakes I failed to appreciate. He tottered. He flowered. He writhed time to a fraught quiet, and kicked occasionally, and lay there twitching, watching me die.

For all the pain passed down the genes or latent in the very grain of being; for the lordless mornings, the smear of spirit words intuit and inter; for all the nightfall neverness inking into me even now, my prayer is that a mind blurred by anxiety or despair might find here a trace of peace.

Today I woke and believed in nothing. A grief at once intimate and unfelt, like the death of a good friend’s dog. Tired of the mind reaching back in the past for rescue I praise the day. I don’t mean merely some mythical, isolate instant like the mindless mindfulness specialist who at the terminal cancer convention (not that it was called that) exhorted the new year’s crop of slaughters (ditto) to “taste” the day, this one unreplicable instant of being alive. (The chicken glistened.) Nor do I mean a day devoid of past and future as craved that great craze of minds and times Fernando Pessoa, who wanted not “the present” but reality itself, things in their thingness rather than the time that measures them. Time is in the table at which I sit and in the words I type. In the red-checked shirt my father’s mother used to wear when she was gardening and which I kept because it held her smell (though it does no longer) there is still plenty of time. Two murderers keep their minds alive while they wait to die. They talk through slots in their doors of whatever mercy or misery the magazine has ordained for the day — the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, say, ten signs that a relationship is on the rocks. When their communion flags, as communions will, they rekindle it with personal revelations, philosophical digressions, humor. This is a true story, one of them says sometimes by way of preface, as if that gave the moment more gravity, asked of the listener a different attention, at once resisted and reinforced an order wherein every hour has its sound, every day its grace, and every death is by design. “Love is possible for anyone,” I hear the TV talk-show host say, which is true in the way most things in this life are true, which is to say, false, unless and until the nullifying, catalyzing death is felt. Love is possible for anyone because it is equally impossible for everyone. To be is to be confronted with a void, a blankness, a blackness that both appeals and appalls. Once known — known by the void, I mean — one has three choices. Walk away, and unlearn the instinct of awe. Walk along, and learn to believe that awe asks nothing of you. Are you with me, love? (For love read faith.) Naked once and after a rat, my father cried, “Die, vermin, die!” banging the broomstick over and over on the floor so incorrigibly dirty it might as well have been the earth itself. This is my mother’s story, though I was there, I’m told, and no small part of the pandemonium. We were five souls crammed into one life, and so incorrigibly poor — or was that fear? — we all slept in one room and shared one great big chester drawers, as we called it, and not with irony but in earnest ignorance, just as like meant lack, as in “How much do you like bein’ done with your chemo?” and just as I and every other child I knew, before we tucked into our lemon meringue pie, solemnly wiped the calf slobbers off. Ah, local color, peasant levity, the language fuming and steaming rich as the mist of rot that rises off the compost heap (“kitchen midden,” you might hear an old Scot still say). When do we first know? That there’s a world to which we’ve been, not oblivious, exactly, but so inside we couldn’t see it, who now see nothing else? Heaven is over. Or hell. Did you forget the rat? It thumps and thrashes like a poltergeist inside the chest of drawers but somehow, though my father is fast, and though his rage is becoming real, every drawer he opens is empty. What happens when we die, every child of every father eventually asks. What happens when we don’t is the better question. To kill a wasp on water is the peak of speed. My brother who is other has a mind of lead. I with my stinging griefs watch from away. How can it be there are no adults left? What matters here is timing, not time. His hand is high and white above the blue. A wasp is also atom and urge, hover and touch. Even wings are not a clean distinction. Down comes the slap like a rifle shot. What vengeance can there be on blank necessity? My brother who is other has a way. His hand is high and white. And then it’s not. Once when my father’s mother’s health was failing and she found it more and more difficult to tend to the tiny family plot at Champion, Texas, which is less town than time at this point, a blink of old buildings and older longings the rare driver flashes past, I took it upon myself to salt the graves as I must have read somewhere would work for unwanted growths. As indeed it did. In the months after, every Sunday when we spoke, she thanked me for the blankness, the blackness, (my words, of course) this new ease I had allowed her mind. Until one day leaning over with flowers the leached earth opened and my eighty-year-old grandmother tumbled right down among the bones of the woman from whom she’d first emerged. To see that image you have to be that sky. It has to happen in you, that crushing calling viewless blue that is so deeply in you that it is not you. “O, Law’, honey, I like to died.” You don’t climb out of poverty so much as carry it with you. Some shell themselves with wealth. Some get and spend, get and spend, skimming existence like a Jesus lizard. But for those whose souls have known true want — whose souls perhaps are true want — money remains, in some sense, permanently inert, like an erotic thought that flashes through a eunuch’s brain. In 1980 my father bought his first airplane, a scream-proof four-seater we crammed five inside, which he considerately slammed into a sorghum field alone. Unkillable, he killed the next ten years with work and wives, then bought another, and brought it down in the solitary fire that was his aspect and atmosphere. Homes, schemes, thirty years of savings plowed into a sign company (!) that did not, it turned out, exist. A hole is hard to carry. People ask if I believe in God and the verb is tedious to me. Not wrong, not offensive, not intrusive, not embarrassing. Tedious. Today I saw a hawk land on Elizabeth’s chimney. It sat with its bone frown and banker’s breast above the proud houses of Hamden. Are you with me? Then see, too, a lump of animate ash rising from the flue (or so it seems) to be a pigeon fluttering dumbly down next to that implacable raptor, suddening a world of strange relations wherein there is no need for fear, or far, or meat. There was a man made of airplane parts, one of which was always missing. He wandered the hospital grounds in search of a rudder, an aileron, or some other fragment that would let him fly from this place where he was not meant to be. There was a woman who emitted invective ceaselessly, dispassionately, an obscenity machine. One timid gentleman saved Saran wrap for five full years and every night wrought an ever-more-solid ball with which, it turned out, he planned to bash the skull of the first soul he saw the dawn God blessed his weapon. (A success story, alas.) Another man with anvil hands sat six months of nights in faith that there would come occasion of darkness, unguardedness, and vision sufficient to rip from its socket one of my father’s bright blue eyes. (Ditto.) My father moved among them like a father. He attended and pacified, he instructed and consoled. Late to the trade, he worked too much, and trusted his heart, no doubt, more than he should, but was, by all accounts, at this one thing, and despite the end, good. For love read faith into these lines that so obviously lack it. For love let words turn to life in the way life turns to world under the observer’s eye, the swirl of particles with their waves and entanglements, their chance and havoc, resolving into some one thing: a raptor on a rooftop, say. No power on earth can make it stay. But is it lost or released into formlessness when we look away? To be is to believe that the man or woman who inscribed with an idiosyncratic but demanding calligraphy Fuck da money—Trust no one on the rough blanket of the residential motel where my father spent the last two years of his rough residential life intended the note of defiant, self-conscious (da!) humor that left my father, whom I had not seen in years, and I, whom years had seen grow sere, far even from myself, erupting in laughter until we cried. Before my good friend’s good dog died ten times a day she pressed her forehead to his “to confirm the world and her place in it.” Now she won’t even say his name. Strange how the things that burn worst in one heart one must keep silent to keep. Ten to one you thought of men. The murderers, I mean. But no. This is a true story. There is another cell, you see, in which a woman I have known since childhood, and since childhood have known to be suspended on a wire of time but nimble-witted nonetheless, lies on the cold stone floor. She is even more naked than they have made her. She has killed no one not even herself. Punishment, perhaps, or some contagion of fate, finds her here, her hair shorn, both wrists wrapped, her eyes open, pondering the parable of perfect silence. Remember, he said,memory is a poor man’s prison. Make to have and to love one live infinitive

1. deathbed There is a word that is not water, has nothing to do with heat or light, is unrelated to any one pain though the torn body tears itself further trying to speak it. There is a sound beyond all the sounds that I have made, the needs that one by one I've tried to name. It burns clear in the eyes searching mine, the lips beginning to bleed again, her hand squeezing my hand, pleading and pleading that I understand. 2. living will All afternoon in the afterlife of little things that love, or pain, or need could not let go of I hunt for the will that will let me let you go. I am distracted and slow— all the grainy faces in old photographs, letters from the dead, deeds to places that are only air, some bright nowhere of broad fields and sunlight that was my idea of heaven one long afternoon of clouds and steady rain when you sat and explained where a garden was, a well, excited by it, the hell ahead of you just a brief tightness at your heart. Outside in the yard, crickets start, cry here and here and here, night's thousand shadows growing tall. And now I have it, formal, final. I touch each keepsake like a wall. 3. going In the hard light and hum of the room to which I've come to stay, I watch the clock, and wait, and hour by hour begin to disappear. Movements, mutterings: the brain darkens like a landscape. Pain in the pale arterial hills flashes and vanishes, takes with it one whole year. Cotton and killdeer, a cloud looks down, something's happened in the wellhouse, someone runs through tall trees, breathe and breathe, is it my hand you hold? The fever climbs. You grow cold, then warm, now cold again, a hive of nerves in the skin. Some glimmer breaks through and I bend whispering as fear like a wind shakes you, I'm right here, I'm right here... Midnight, moonlight gauzing the walls, the iron and umber of intensive care: I watch as it swells and falls the puttied scar at your heart, and read each beat and falter on a screen and match my breathing to the breathing of a machine to know this time as it passes, each moment as it goes— until, early, you shudder and quieten, blood gases begin to rapidly rise and somewhere behind your eyes I fall in fragments away: a child surprised at his play, encroached upon by air, a shattered man near dawn, something about the way he holds so still, his hair.

I have no illusion some fusion of force and form will save me, bewilderment of bonelight ungrave me as when the El shooting through a hell of ratty alleys where nothing thrives but soot and the ratlike lives that have learned to eat it screechingly peacocked a grace of sparks so far out and above the fast curve that jostled and fastened us into a single shock of— I will not call it love but at least some brief and no doubt illusionary belief that in one surge of brain we were all seeing one thing: a lone unearned loveliness struck from an iron pain. Already it was gone. Already it was bone, the gray sky and the encroaching skyline pecked so clean by raptor night I shuddered at the cold gleam we hurtled toward like some insentient herd plunging underground at Clark and Division. And yet all that day I had a kind of vision that's never gone completely away of immense clear-paned towers and endlessly expendable hours through which I walked teeming human streets, filled with a shine that was most intimately me and not mine.

I don't want to be alive anymore. I don't want to be alive enough to want that. One is not meant to turn on one's creator with ferocity expendable in only one way. Or is that exactly how one is meant to turn to burn beyond the love that from beyond being has come to us: Christ's ever unhearable and thus always too bearable scream. In love and dread we learn to listen for beloved dread coming upon us like a whiplash rain we watch through a window. In pain we learn pain. Sometimes amid the rancid moonlight and mindlice of my insomnia there gleams a scalpel blade so clean with meaning so shaped and sharpened to interstellar blue that drawing it —in season due — across my own throat there comes not blood but an ancient answering starlight. Once upon a time in a pleasingly modern slaughterhospice with a view of sky-contempted skyscrapers and Lake Michigan's immaculate sewage my inner skin was skinned mouth to bowels, my soul —deadword, die to find it. For self-pity there must remain a self. Ah, but even shitting one's self one still finds one's self hastening to hide it all from the kind Ukranian nearly bearded night nurse. Fentanyl patches patching my stalactite thighs my diaphanous shoulders the very air eating me like a late leaf that once I would have flourished for a perishable lover or lonelied like some catpiss poignancy into a poem. Dead brain, living will, little pills entangling pain with adoration of it, morphine machine whose little beep (heavenly bell) conjures me to the suddenly more tolerable hallways of hell . . . Lovely Leila, so unsurgically curved, disclosing as she leans to clean my lines a bit of icelace undergarment like the very last trace of a glacier. The brain the brain the brain flickering electrically in and out, in, out— not the mind in which I love my wife whose tightwound nightmind conjures Christ in diapers, for instance, filthy infant, or later, in a mist of adolescent bad weather, bored of wood, dogdead Judea, squawk-box God, some restless absurdity of earth, she says, through which the rest of heaven can come. Once upon a time I walked through the chemical glamour of a night refinery sparking dangerously without and within for beside me under her underclothes undulated an incarnation of creation's finest failure: moonskin to make a young man wince coupled with stifling innocence. Still, we managed. And over the wrought-iron railing of the country club to which neither of us could possibly belong, in the moonskinned pool that seemed both to embody and imbibe her, we improved. And later, out on a green (to be sixteen!) when the starshower I thought was mine was mining me for sweat, muscle, memory to make its own death shine unceasingly inside of me, even unto hell, we excelled. Can it be that her last name was really Key? So much life in this poem so much salvageable and saving love but it is I fear I swear I tear open what heart I have left to keep it from being and beating and bearing down upon me • What rest in faith wrested from grief What truce with truth in bowing down not to the ground of being but simply to the ground Affliction flickers distant now like a structure on fire Love's reprieve moves through me like a breeze But antlike existence crawls all over me Lord and I cry out if you call this vise quiet a cry this riot of needs and genes an I Feelingly among the bones and nerves of sounds I make my scathing way Failingly in church or in the parked car before work I try to pray What might it mean to surrender to the wonder nothing means Not to end with a little flourish of earth Not to end • Love is the living heart of dread Love I love you unto the very edge of being Dead • Something in us suffering touches, teaches first to find little coves in our loves: blank nothings wherein we are what we always were — blank nothings — but changed or rearranged as atoms in the random kingdom of things: hand, we say, or eye, or hair, as if to make ourselves — to stake ourselves — truly there Knowing now not to move in time we are moved by tiger-striped tails bloodfine fins some natureless cerulean one would say thinking oneself out of nature Something in us, suffering, touches, torches, so we may saunter seeingly through an altogether other element, as once in the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago I floated    a moment with my love and the two new lives borne from us who loved best the eensy green almost unfish more like the stars when you close your eyes and whirl open to the whirling grains so freed from things you fall down laughing at the havoc For me for a long time not the minnows mattered but the pattern after: miraculous I didn't think to think: all those mite-eyes and animate instants answering at once to my need and to nothing as if my very nerves worked in finally a saving sense Something in us touches suffering touching us like the constellations of kinetic quiet that bound us beyond us as right to the wall the girls pressed their still-forming faces through which the wild new schools flew almost too green too blue to stand And I held your hand.