445 Religion poems

If there is a god, let it be the hyena who plunges her mouth into the river after eating our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who, dark with thirst, poisons the river unbeknownst to both of them. Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called already through “time” out of our houses. She tells her stories. We tell her ours. We all clean our teeth with what is sharp. She asks,Will you add this story to your stories of history & land & peace? Yes, we will add this story. We ask her, Will you add these poems to your repertoire of songs about hunger & thirst & fur?& she, being wiser than we, says,Yes, I will sing them if you grant me your permission to turn them into poems about a mercy.

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose. Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose. Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those. And now upon his western wing he leaned, Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened, Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows. Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars With memory of the old revolt from Awe, He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank. Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.

Tired of his dark dominion ... —George Meredith It was something I’d overheard One evening at a party; a man I liked enormously Saying to a mutual friend, a woman Wearing a vest embroidered with scarlet and violet tulips That belled below each breast, “Well, I’ve always Preferred Athens; Greece seems to me a country Of the day—Rome, I’m afraid, strikes me As being a city of the night ... ” Of course, I knew instantly just what he meant— Not simply because I love Standing on the terrace of my apartment on a clear evening As the constellations pulse low in the Roman sky, The whole mind of night that I know so well Shimmering in its elaborate webs of infinite, Almost divine irony. No, and it wasn’t only that Rome Was my city of the night, that it was here I’d chosen To live when I grew tired of my ancient life As the Underground Man. And it wasn’t that Rome’s darkness Was of the kind that consoles so many Vacancies of the soul; my Rome, with its endless history Of falls ... No, it was that this dark was the deep, sensual dark Of the dreamer; this dark was like the violet fur Spread to reveal the illuminated nipples of The She-Wolf—all the sequins above in sequence, The white buds lost in those fields of ever-deepening gentians, A dark like the polished back of a mirror, The pool of the night scalloped and hanging Above me, the inverted reflection of a last, Odd Narcissus ... One night my friend Nico came by Close to three a.m. —As we drank a little wine, I could see The black of her pupils blown wide, The spread ripples of the opiate night ... And Nico Pulled herself close to me, her mouth almost Touching my mouth, as she sighed, “Look ... ,” And deep within the pupil of her left eye, Almost like the mirage of a ship’s distant, hanging Lantern rocking with the waves, I could see, at the most remote end of the receding, Circular hallway of her eye, there, at its doorway, At the small aperture of the black telescope of the pupil, A tiny, dangling crucifix— Silver, lit by the ragged shards of starlight, reflecting In her as quietly as pain, as simply as pain ... Some years later, I saw Nico on stage in New York, singing Inside loosed sheets of shattered light, a fluid Kaleidoscope washing over her—the way any naked, Emerging Venus steps up along the scalloped lip Of her shell, innocent and raw as fate, slowly Obscured by a florescence that reveals her simple, deadly Love of sexual sincerity ... I didn’t bother to say hello. I decided to remember The way in Rome, out driving at night, she’d laugh as she let Her head fall back against the cracked, red leather Of my old Lancia’s seats, the soft black wind Fanning her pale, chalky hair out along its currents, Ivory waves of starlight breaking above us in the leaves; The sad, lucent malevolence of the heavens, falling ... Both of us racing silently as light. Nowhere, Then forever ... Into the mind of the Roman night.

Holy Trinity Airship billows a chrys- elephantine cave Louis Sullivan, Arch- itect, lord master, conceived of in the hollow of power. He swells. I am his balloonist balancing an azimuth as earth-apse I orbit, robed in hot gas & leather fastened by a yolk-stalk of gravity to gold- end onions nozzling heavens whose suns are stomachs with churches in their navels. Each we are priests as aeronauts at the vestibules, & enter the cavity: space, self, organ; celest- ial nave bellies stars sailors name saints and adore— their egress is bitter weeping, their praise pure Russian form: a cathedral, my inner orrery.

A snail sank — grand in puss and rime, on three coils (equals one tea-wheel) white. The wheel brings the bill, the bill — bald. Everyone goes in for the table, the tablecloth is of water. One says huh — one morning high on a grape I dropped off — a dunce — and exacted my height, and rightly so: it is a height I won’t have made alone. It is a height erring on all sides. The bride slip’n slides on her back to us — then on her head (a ball-point pen), quicksand in her hair. A man beside her, his mouth is like a dark arch for her. My mouth is death to you! In this new rhythm how can I say, how can I thank you, for I feel a blessing running through my tale now, it shines — intestines — that I will can.

Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint Stands nearer than God stands to our distress, And one small candle shines, but not so faint As the far lights of everlastingness, I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day Where Christ is hanging, rather pray To something more like my own clay, Not too divine; For, once, perhaps my little saint Before he got his niche and crown, Had one short stroll about the town; It brings him closer, just that taint— And anyone can wash the paint Off our poor faces, his and mine! Is that why I see Monty now? equal to any saint, poor boy, as good as gold, But still, with just the proper trace Of earthliness on his shining wedding face; And then gone suddenly blank and old The hateful day of the divorce: Stuart got his, hands down, of course Crowing like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse: But Monty took it hard. All said and done I liked him best,— He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest. It seems too funny all we other rips Should have immortal souls; Monty and Redge quite damnably Keep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships.— It’s funny too, how easily we sink, One might put up a monument, I think To half the world and cut across it “Lost at Sea!” I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night— No, it’s no use this penny light— Or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown— The trees of Calvary are where they were, When we are sure that we can spare The tallest, let us go and strike it down And leave the other two still standing there. I, too, would ask Him to remember me If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see. Oh! quiet Christ who never knew The poisonous fangs that bite us through And make us do the things we do, See how we suffer and fight and die, How helpless and how low we lie, God holds You, and You hang so high, Though no one looking long at You, Can think You do not suffer too, But, up there, from your still, star-lighted tree What can You know, what can You really see Of this dark ditch, the soul of me! We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun, Without paying so heavily for it That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one. I could hardly bear The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk, The thick, close voice of musk, The jessamine music on the thin night air, Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere — The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair, Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street. I think my body was my soul, And when we are made thus Who shall control Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet, Who shall teach us To thrust the world out of our heart: to say, till perhaps in death, When the race is run, And it is forced from us with our last breath “Thy will be done”? If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things. As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings— Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings! The temperate, well-worn smile The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own: And afterwards the child’s, for a little while, With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes So soon to change, and make you feel how quick The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick— (How does one though?) quite early on, Of long green pastures under placid skies, One might be walking now with patient truth. What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth, When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone? There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen, With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat, The dainty head held high against the painted green And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half sweet. Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring To me to-day: a radiance on the wall, So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small, Sapless and lined like a dead leaf, All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief! And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair— Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay—? Or could—with any one of the old crew, But oh! these boys! the solemn way They take you and the things they say— This “I have only as long as you” When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two— Although at heart perhaps—God! if it were Only the face, only the hair! If Jim had written to me as he did to-day A year ago—and now it leaves me cold— I know what this means, old, old,old: Et avec ça—mais on a vécu, tout se paie. That is not always true: there was my Mother (well at least the dead are free!) Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am, Monty too; The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hell so patiently; The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me—and what of me ? But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot see How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity. If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came; Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any darkened day. Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last year’s May, No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday; For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way, The shadows are never the same. “Find rest in Him” One knows the parsons’ tags— Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of baa-ing sheep: Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags, For so He giveth His belovèd sleep. Oh! He will take us stripped and done, Driven into His heart. So we are won: Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings— I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things. But I shall not be in them. Let Him take The finer ones, the easier to break. And they are not gone, yet, for me, the lights, the colours, the perfumes, Though now they speak rather in sumptuous rooms. In silks and in gemlike wines; Here, even, in this corner where my little candle shines And overhead the lancet-window glows With golds and crimsons you could almost drink To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think There was the scent in every red and yellow rose Of all the sunsets. But this place is grey, And much too quiet. No one here, Why, this is awful, this is fear! Nothing to see, no face. Nothing to hear except your heart beating in space As if the world was ended. Dead at last! Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast. These to go on with and alone, to the slow end: No one to sit with, really, or to speak to, friend to friend: Out of the long procession, black or white or red Not one left now to say “Still I am here, then see you, dear, lay here your head”. Only the doll’s house looking on the Park To-night, all nights, I know, when the man puts the lights out, very dark. With, upstairs, in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maids' footsteps overhead, Then utter silence and the empty world—the room—the bed— The corpse! No, not quite dead, while this cries out in me. But nearly: very soon to be A handful of forgotten dust— There must be someone. Christ! there must, Tell me there will be someone. Who? If there were no one else, could it be You? How old was Mary out of whom you cast So many devils? Was she young or perhaps for years She had sat staring, with dry eyes, at this and that man going past Till suddenly she saw You on the steps of Simon’s house And stood and looked at You through tears. I think she must have known by those The thing, for what it was that had come to her. For some of us there is a passion, I suppose, So far from earthly cares and earthly fears That in its stillness you can hardly stir Or in its nearness, lift your hand, So great that you have simply got to stand Looking at it through tears, through tears. Then straight from these there broke the kiss, I think You must have known by this The thing, for what it was, that had come to You: She did not love You like the rest, It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best, She gave You something altogether new. And through it all, from her, no word, She scarcely saw You, scarcely heard: Surely You knew when she so touched You with her hair, Or by the wet cheek lying there, And while her perfume clung to You from head to feet all through the day That You can change the things for which we care, But even You, unless You kill us, not the way. This, then was peace for her, but passion too. I wonder was it like a kiss that once I knew, The only one that I would care to take Into the grave with me, to which if there were afterwards, to wake. Almost as happy as the carven dead In some dim chancel lying head by head We slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through— One breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing behind our lips was endless life, Lost, as I woke, to hear in the strange earthly dawn, his “Are you there?” And lie still, listening to the wind outside, among the firs. So Mary chose the dream of Him for what was left to her of night and day, It is the only truth: it is the dream in us that neither life nor death nor any other thing can take away: But if she had not touched Him in the doorway of the dream could she have cared so much ? She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first the touch. And He has never shared with me my haunted house beneath the trees Of Eden and Calvary, with its ghosts that have not any eyes for tears, And the happier guests who would not see, or if they did, remember these, Though they lived there a thousand years. Outside, too gravely looking at me. He seems to stand, And looking at Him, if my forgotten spirit came Unwillingly back, what could it claim Of those calm eyes, that quiet speech, Breaking like a slow tide upon the beach, The scarred, not quite human hand ?— Unwillingly back to the burden of old imaginings When it has learned so long not to think, not to be, Again, again it would speak as it has spoken to me of things That I shall not see! I cannot bear to look at this divinely bent and gracious head: When I was small I never quite believed that He was dead: And at the Convent school I used to lie awake in bed Thinking about His hands. It did not matter what they said, He was alive to me, so hurt, so hurt! And most of all in Holy Week When there was no one else to see I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly, If He had ever seemed to notice me Or, if, for once, He would only speak.

By menopause, it’s not just estrogen my mother lacks. She’s lost her eldest son— that’s me, the one who’s queer—the doctor who once made her very proud. These days, I do my own wash when I’m home, I cook for her so she can take a break from all the chores she now refuses to assign to me. She sits, half-watching Ricki through her tea’s thin steam, her squint of disapproval more denial than it is disgust. She hears much better than she sees—it’s easier to keep out vision than it is to clear the air of sounds—and yet I know it’s age that stultifies her senses too. Enraged because she’s lost so much, I understand why suddenly she looks so stunned as from the television: “. . . Bitch, she stole my boyfriend, my own mother did! . . .” I fold a towel noiselessly. I know she thinks it’s garbage, sinful, crap—just as she thinks that taking estrogen in pills is not what God intended, no matter what the doctors say; or that I’m gay is plain unnatural, she can’t endure such pain. The oven timer rings. The cookies that I’ve baked are done. I’ll make another batch though she won’t touch them: given up for Lent. My mother’s love. I wonder where it went.

the darkest hour the stars arisen asinine tomb and I left opened to the altogether am I to live among men abandoned I may learn to love again adrift in Jerusalem am I upon strewn palm

The courage to let go of the door, the handle. The courage to shed the familiar walls whose very stains and leaks are comfortable as the little moles of the upper arm; stains that recall a feast, a child’s naughtiness, a loud blattering storm that slapped the roof hard, pouring through. The courage to abandon the graves dug into the hill, the small bones of children and the brittle bones of the old whose marrow hunger had stolen; the courage to desert the tree planted and only begun to bear; the riverside where promises were shaped; the street where their empty pots were broken. The courage to leave the place whose language you learned as early as your own, whose customs however dan- gerous or demeaning, bind you like a halter you have learned to pull inside, to move your load; the land fertile with the blood spilled on it; the roads mapped and annotated for survival. The courage to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain that cannot be imagined, mapless, walking into the wilderness, going barefoot with a canteen into the desert; stuffed in the stinking hold of a rotting ship sailing off the map into dragons’ mouths, Cathay, India, Siberia, goldeneh medina 2 leaving bodies by the way like abandoned treasure. So they walked out of Egypt. 3 So they bribed their way out of Russia under loads of straw; so they steamed out of the bloody smoking charnelhouse of Europe on overloaded freighters forbidden all ports— out of pain into death or freedom or a different painful dignity, into squalor and politics. We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage, who walked into the strange and became strangers and gave birth to children who could look down on them standing on their shoulders for having been slaves. We honor those who let go of every- thing but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought, who became other by saving themselves. * A popular preacher or an angel who conveys, in mysterious ways, teachings only to scholars worthy ofl such communications (Hebrew). 2. Golden land (Yiddish). 3. A reference to the biblical Exodus out of Egypt.

If only you’d been a better mother. How could I have been a better mother? I would have needed a better self, and that is a gift I never received. So you’re saying it’s someone else’s fault? The gift of having had a better mother myself, my own mother having had a better mother herself. The gift that keeps on not being given. Who was supposed to give it? How am I supposed to know? Well, how am I supposed to live? I suppose you must live as if you had been given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance. I cut off my hair, to sell for the money to buy you what you wanted. I wanted nothing but your happiness. I can’t give you that! What would Jesus do? He had a weird mother too . . . Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if it were given unconditionally, your birthright. It’s a riddle. All gifts are a riddle, all lives are in the middle of mother-lives. But it’s always winter in this world. There is no end to ending. The season of giving, the season when the bears are never cold, because they are sleeping. The bears are never cold, Mama, but I am one cold, cold bear.