Leontia Flynn

At the mention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mild-mannered father — tender, abstracted — would exercise the right to revert to type. That is to say: devout; that is, proscriptive. He would rather we did not so bandy the good Jesuit’s name about in talk of “gay this” and “gay that” — just as he would rather my sister did not, from the library, request “sick”Lolita. Like tars on a stage deck, yo ho, we roll our eyes. Somebody snaps on the poisonous gas-fired heater — and I put off a year or two the hypothesis I’ll form, with a wave, to provoke him to these wobblers that all in such matters swing from pole to pole; as Hopkins was wont (his muse being bi[nsey] po[p]lar[s]) to swing from joy’s heights, alas, to the abyss and for whom the mind had “mountains; cliffs of fall.” • “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there....    ” Who’s not known the hell that fashions itself from the third night without sleep — the third or the fourth — in whose black margins crawl shrill horrors, and where breathless, poleaxed, pinned — as though in the teeth of an outrageous gale — the mind — sick — preys upon the stricken mind. And “worst, there is none” — no none — than this wild grief: Citalopram-wired. Our sweating selves self-cursed. Oh, “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?” as Hopkins wrote — but, far gone, at its worst it’s her first form I want. Please stroke my hair. It’s alright now. I’m here, I’m here. There, there.