445 Religion poems

“Let ’ s be the same wound if we must bleed. Let ’ s fight side by side, even if the enemy is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.” —Tommy Olofsson, Sweden I’m not interested in who suffered the most. I’m interested in people getting over it. Once when my father was a boy a stone hit him on the head. Hair would never grow there. Our fingers found the tender spot and its riddle: the boy who has fallen stands up. A bucket of pears in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home. The pears are not crying. Later his friend who threw the stone says he was aiming at a bird. And my father starts growing wings. Each carries a tender spot: something our lives forgot to give us. A man builds a house and says, “I am native now.” A woman speaks to a tree in place of her son. And olives come. A child’s poem says, “I don’t like wars, they end up with monuments.” He’s painting a bird with wings wide enough to cover two roofs at once. Why are we so monumentally slow? Soldiers stalk a pharmacy: big guns, little pills. If you tilt your head just slightly it’s ridiculous. There’s a place in my brain where hate won’t grow. I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds. Something pokes us as we sleep. It’s late but everything comes next.

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.

The small grey cloudy louse that nests in my beard Is not, as some have called it, ‘a pearl of God’ — No, it is a fiery tormentor Waking me at two a.m. Or thereabouts, when the lights are still on In the houses in the pa, to go across thick grass Wet with rain, feet cold, to kneel For an hour or two in front of the red flickering Tabernacle light — what He sees inside My meandering mind I can only guess — A madman, a nobody, a raconteur Whom He can joke with — ‘Lord,’ I ask Him, ‘Do You or don’t You expect me to put up with lice?’ His silent laugh still shakes the hills at dawn.

One writes telling me I am her guiding light And my poems her bible — on this cold morning After moss I smoke one cigarette And hear a magpie chatter in the paddock, The image of Hatana — he bashes at the windows In idiot spite, shouting — ‘Pakeha! You can be ‘The country’s leading poet’ — at the church I murmured, ‘Tena koe,' To the oldest woman and she replied, ‘Tena koe’— Yet the red book is shut from which I should learn Maori And these daft English words meander on, How dark a light! Hatana, you have gripped me Again by the balls; you sift and riddle my mind On the rack of the middle world, and from my grave at length A muddy spring of poems will gush out.

A baby is borne us blis to bring; A maidden, I hard, “Loullay,” sing: “Dere son, now leive thy wepping, Thy fadere is the King of Blis.” “Nay! Dere modere, for you weppe I noght, But for thinges that shall be wroght, Or that I have mankind iboght. Was ther never pain like it, iwis.” “Pes! dere sone, say thou me not so. Thou art my child, I have no mo. Alas! That I shuld see this wo: It were to me gret heivynis.” “My hondes, modere, that ye now see, Thay shall be nailed one a tree; My feit, also, fastned shall be: Full mony shall wepe that it shall see.” “Alas! dere son, sorrow now is my happe To see my child that soukes my pappe So ruthfully taken out of my lappe. It were to me gret heivynis.” “Also, modere, ther shall a speire My tendere hert all to-teire: The blud shall kevere my body there. Gret ruthe it shall be to see.” “A! dere sone, that is a heivy cas. When Gabrell knelled before my face And said, ‘Heille! Lady, full of grace,’ He never told me nothing of this. “Dere modere, pes! Nowe I you pray, And take no sorrow for that I say, But singe this song, ‘By, by, loullay,’ To drive away all heivynis.”

unlike you and I jesus knew he’d die some days a headache woke him it lingered nothing terrible but the word hung around his temples like this soul everyone wants but can’t find jesus knew he’d die he just didn’t know how & that bothered him sometimes & then he’d do one of his little bootleg tricks what the hell, didn’t hurt anyone didn’t make anyone disappear for- ever but the tricks stopped working he forgot why he did them & what for he confused a story about a guy named jesus with a story about a father he never knew & it all began to hang like a motheaten coat pulled out of a trunk on shaky days hey let’s return to the scene of the fucken tragedy at least we all know how it turns out instead of this end- less uncertainty hey let’s sell our souls a few more times no one’s really counting (those little papers you trade for your sins, what do you call them? anyone? no?) —anyway—jesus this jesus that god of nickel god of dime right, the real jesus he was lost he walked in- to the desert not far really his friends his disciples he told them he’d come back like us he said this every time he left but jesus never said wait never pointed to the sky never claimed he’d rise again never asked us to eat his flesh jesus never asked anything as far as I can tell he got tired everyday & then slept sometimes okay sometimes un- bearable, the dreams, the father pointing a finger at everyone a finger we can’t even look at.

Jesu Christ, my lemmon swete, That diyedest on the Rode Tree, With all my might I thee beseche, For thy woundes two and three, That also faste mot thy love Into mine herte fitched be As was the spere into thine herte, Whon thou soffredest deth for me.

After fighting with his dead brothers and his dead sisters he chose to paint the dead rooster of his youth, thinking God wouldn’t mind a rooster, would he?—or thinking a rooster would look good in a green armchair with flecks of blood on his breast and thighs, his wings resting a little, their delicate bones exposed, a few of the plumes in blue against the yellow naked body, all of those feathers plucked as if by a learned butcher, and yet the head hanging down, the comb disgraced, the mouth open as if for screaming, the right front chair leg, seen from a certain angle, either a weapon or a strong right arm, a screaming arm, the arm of an agitator; and yet at the same time the chair as debonair as any, the brown mahogany polished, the carving nineteenth century, the velvet green, an old velour, as if to match the plumes a little, a blue with a green. No rabbi was present, this he knew, and no dead butcher had ever been there with his burnished knife and his bucket of sand; this was the angry rooster that strutted from one small house to another, that scratched among the rhubarb, he is the one who stopped as if he were thinking, he is upside down now and plucked. It looks as if his eye can hardly contain that much of sorrow, as if it wanted to disappear, and it looks as if his legs were almost helpless, and though his body was huge compared to the armchair, it was only more horrible that way, and though his wings were lifted it wasn’t for soaring, it was more for bedragglement and degradation. Whatever else there was of memory there had to be revenge in there, even revenge on himself, for he had to be the rooster, though that was easy, he was the armchair too, and he was the butcher, it was a way to understand, there couldn’t be another, he had to paint like that, he has to scrape the skin and put the blotches on, and though it was grotesque to put a dead rooster in an armchair his table could have been full, or he just liked the arrangement, or he was good at painting a chair and it was done first—although I doubt it—or someone brought him the bird—a kind of gift—for food was cheap then, and roosters were easy to cook; but it was more than anything else a kind of Tartar, a kind of Jew, he was painting, something that moved from Asia to Europe, something furious, ill and dreamy, something that stood in the mud beside a large wooden building and stared at a cloud, it was so deep in thought, and it had tears in a way, there was no getting around that kind of thinking even if he stood in the middle of the room holding his paintbrush like a thumb at arm’s length closing one of his eyes he still was standing in the mud shrieking, he still was dying for corn, he still was golden underneath his feathers with freckles of blood, for he was a ripped-open Jew, and organs all on show, the gizzard, the liver, for he was a bleeding Tartar, and he was a Frenchman dying on the way to Paris and he was tethered to a table, he was slaughtered.

“Turn back!” was all she snapped out as she passed in a red dress that caught sunrays through mist. I saw her lurch upwind, kick off spiked heels, climb out to the edge of a knife-sharp rockpile, and, arms outstretched, lead the sea’s tympani, lure the din, guiding the steamy waves to shore.Will the Almighty answer me? she sang out to the ocean’s rising octaves, as blown palms pointed scarflike fronds to land. Earlier that Sunday, she had prayed to a black Christ in a church on the island, droned verses for a safe calm, and trekked homeward to board white louvered windows for the storm. She had refused the chapel’s sanctuary to ask the ocean why the wind ripped homes and would again. Her anger captured me, and stayed when I saw rain gleam on red ginger, drench trumpets islanders call yellow-bells, and soak ixora. Bonelike bits of shells and conchs lay on the beach as on an altar. Silent, I watched her. Under a blank sky, where waves broke over coral, in thick haze, pitched forward to hear the whirlwind’s reply, she shook a fist, then opened hands in praise.

1 An Ireland, as of chalk, the sky standing in for the sea, the beach a reach of blue, the vineyards’ green scooped out in cirque, in cove, a subtlety of air laps the eyes, abob like barques come from afar, and the viator standing there, poised to dis- embark, the undercurrent of air escaping him, tossed to & fro, gaze wrenched from its angle of purchase upon the world, capsized, head now careened against the suddenness of rock, eyes whiplashed into new prospects, he drowns in fire, enflamed, fine silk aquiver at the singe of brazier, he burns: would Hell be as blue, or the sun the obverse of God? 2 Now at Laon, the Lugdunum of the North, deposited on this citadel of chalk, white arx, former temple of Lug, the light- god of the Gauls, & he, this Celt from Hibernia, setting foot on this podium, this puy, this platform afloat at cloud & wind height, blown in from the septentrion, breathes in the quintessence of rains, alevel the briar’s pinks, zone where water, at first cold snap, turns to snow. Fallen from fire. Autumn’s pure light whitens the mount, the tufa reverberating the radiance of a Cyclades isle, here mis- placed, high above these plains, by some error in translation. 3 At Lindisfarne, let us suppose — even if Alcuin’s letters to the island’s monks exhorting them to combat the Viking may be evidence to the contrary — that he studied Greek, that Charles the Bald, offshoot of the Pippinids, summoned him here to Laon to translate Dionysus. Between the king’s vineyards & the blue sky, a whisper of the North Sea in the channel of Île Sainte when the seals bark at ebb tide, Johannes the Hibernian cocks an ear despite finding his coracle of Latin too frail a craft to explore the peninsulas of Greek, & carries with him the long-lapping waves of Scotland & seaweed’s tang where kingfisher nests beside nugget of amber. 4 That which lies out of reach taking the shape of this white & shadowy rock on which he is now beached & whose slope he now climbs, blind beneath the sun, fallen from the same height he ascends, would Satan be extending him his welcome with the same dark radiance of stone between his eyes & the same fine peppering of pinks that spice his senses on either side of the stairs, against this, what whiteness, what candor? The sky’s rarified air, there to calculate the distances between the things he climbs or descends, the divisions of the world now extended, now illuminated between the lines, the borders of the intangible now flaring up with darkness, the granular opacities now brightening, the sun biting into the margins of the real, the image dying. 5 Denys, foundation of all cathedrals to come, mentor of naves, stained glass rosettes, of all the gossamer shadow spiderwebbing the light from the East as it rises, Lord of Ionia, oriental Ionas, Denys, Dionysos, your Greek sailing the great hill of Lugdunum, your darkness raining down its alphas, its Alphei, the dawn uncorking the fizz of its dations. John Scotus comments, his violet ink relighting, igniting the world according to Plato, filtering the grit of the flower through the sieve of the eye, the bran, the curds of light, sifting out the clots of theology, in this shadowy cave, the locals burning every log in sight,hoc lignum, a bonfire of stones held in common,lapis iste. 6 And if some hick might ask Quomodo omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt?