445 Religion poems

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word? He is a brittle crazy glass; Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace. But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, Making thy life to shine within The holy preachers, then the light and glory More reverend grows, and more doth win; Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin. Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one When they combine and mingle, bring A strong regard and awe; but speech alone Doth vanish like a flaring thing, And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

I. Smilers, smirkers, chucklers, grinners, platitudinizers, euphemists: it wasn't you I emulated there, in that Godawful place. What kind of face to put on it? How simple is a simon's sign? To my mind laughter's not the mark of pleasure, not a pleasantry that spread; instead it's intimate with sheer delirium: spilt brain on split lip, uncontainable interiority— (make no mistake, it is a horror, this inmated, intimated self, revealed as your material: red smear, white swipe). It's said the brain stinks first, then organworks of art and eatery, and then—what's left? a little cartilage for ambiguity? a little tendon's B&D? At last, the least ephemeral of evidences: nuggetworks (discrete, and indiscreet) of teeth, bone-bits, odd scraps of a delapidated strut—and this is just the sort of stuff, insensate, to which life (which comes again as slime) has always loved adhering. Life! Who wouldn't laugh? Your inner life! Your pet pretense! It can't be kept up, can't be kept clean, even in a thought, except a good bloodworks or shitpump keeps it so. II. Out of the mouth comes a tongue, it calls itself linguistic and it never quite effects the cover-up (good Lord, there's much to cover up: so many belches, outcries, upchucks, sneezes, puffings, hiccups, osculations, hawks and coughs)— so laughter (which, among the noises, prides itself on being the most intellectual) can't help but come out, snorting. Nothing smiled or mild or meanwhiling—a laugh's got teeth to send it off, and spit to keep it company, and rot to end up with. Its closest kin is grimace, it's a grimacing with wind. It will (the will be damned) burst out in bad cacaphonies of brouhaha and borborygma—it's the stockbroker of mockeries, a trachea rake— the vent of rage and irony, and right there in the very shrine of signs. A laugh, I mean, is sorrow's archery and signature, while flesh is being hoisted and arrayed on roosts of skeleton. III. I saw what good comes to; I saw the figure human being cuts, upon its frame. The laugh was a cry from my own perscrewed, misnailed, cross-crafted armature. Despite your consternations, oh you meekened warners and polite conventioneers, the thieves were better served upon that day. For the heart is a muscle, where cruelty's humored. The tooth of moral rectitude's a fang. What I gave at the sight of him there was up. What I got of humanity there was the hang . . .

They got me into the Sunday-school In Spoon River And tried to get me to drop Confucius for Jesus. I could have been no worse off If I had tried to get them to drop Jesus for Confucius. For, without any warning, as if it were a prank, And sneaking up behind me, Harry Wiley, The minister's son, caved my ribs into my lungs, With a blow of his fist. Now I shall never sleep with my ancestors in Pekin, And no children shall worship at my grave.

I drew solitude over me, on the long shore. —Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude” For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be cut off from his people. —Leviticus 23:29 What is a Jew in solitude? What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own or those you have called your own? What is a woman in solitude:   a queer woman or man? In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert what in this world as it is can solitude mean? The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs with its electric gate, its perfected privacy is not what I mean the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights is not what I mean the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen is not what I mean Three thousand miles from what I once called home I open a book searching for some lines I remember about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside, something that bloomed and faded and was written down in the poet’s book, forever: Opening the poet’s book I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . .the hateful-eyed and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them Robinson Jeffers, multitude is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf, and the separate persons, stooped over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice? To wonder far from your own or those you have called your own to hear strangeness calling you from far away and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind (the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street:Make those bea woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman’s god) Find someone like yourself.   Find others. Agree you will never desert each other. Understand that any rift among you means power to those who want to do you in. Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger. But I have a nightmare to tell:   I am trying to say that to be with my people is my dearest wish but that I also love strangers that I crave separateness I hear myself stuttering these words to my worst friends and my best enemies who watch for my mistakes in grammar my mistakes in love. This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me? If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud. To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege about drifting from the center, drawn to edges, a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is, who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing availing his Blackness Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy to touch her hand;   Jew who has turned her back on midrash and mitzvah(yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?) Solitude, O taboo, endangered species on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have: your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away? have I traded off something I don’t name? To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist? What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for her spirit-vision far from the protection of those she has called her own? Will I find O solitude your plumes, your breasts, your hair against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song? in the old places, anywhere? What is a Jew in solitude? What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man? When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide into the sea when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was founded when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean? 1984-1985

The workman made it; therefore it is not God —Hosea Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Pittsburgh, of Calistoga and Tlaquepaque, ye hierophants and wishbones, teraphim and household plants, for I am a jealous God betrayed. My lover, whom I uplifted, has fallen to other affections. Weep for her outcast state, for I rescind her corn and her fields, her appetites and her husbands, her loom and the cloth of her weaving; yea, as she sleeps in her bed, I will crumble her idols of clay. I will cause to burn in the night her barns filled with swallows, her caves of rodents and bats, her racks of sidereal dresses, her stacks of serpentine hats. The velvet of her touch, once royal, I will scarify with my wrath. for I am a god betrayed; my love has reached into my weakness and turned my heart like a fist. Therefore, I will strip her naked and drive her into the field. In her body of filth and feathers, her blood of beasts and men, she is my desolation and a forgotten name. For my cosmos is contracted. My first world slips from my hands. Tell the people, my prophet Hosea, that I loved her more than love, and she gave not love in return. My anger flattens and spreads along the walls and windows. It glances from my mirrors and breaks the east wind’s bones. I was a God of such strength they could not guess my name. And this woman of human warmth suckled me like a child. Now I dwell with the mole, blindly, and my voice is thin as a gnat’s. I grieve what grinds in me, heavily. I am but a half note, half sung.

Card in pew pocket announces, “I am here.” I made only one statement because of a bad winter. Grease is the word; grease is the way I am feeling. Real life emergencies or flubbing behind the scenes. As a child, I was abandoned in a story made of trees. Here’s the small gasp of this clearing come “upon” “again”

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—

Today I’m thinking of St. Paul—St. Paul, who orders us,Be perfect. He could have said, Touch your elbow to your ears, except that if you broke your arm, then snapped your neck, you might could manage it. The death inside the flawed hard currency of what we touch bamboozles us, existing only for that flaw, that deathward plunge that’s locked inside all form, till what seems solid floats away, dissolves, and these poor bastard things, no longer things, drift back to pure idea. And when, at last, we let them go we start to pity them, attend their needs: I almost have to think to keep my own heart beating through the night. I have a wife and four pink boys. I spin on all this stupid metaphysic now because last afternoon we visited some friends in town. After the pecan pie, I drank until my forehead smacked the table, and woke to find my shirt crusted with blood. When Mary didn’t yell at me, I knew she finally understood that I was gone, dissolving back. As we rode home, I tried to say,I’m sorry, Hon. The carriage bucked across the mud-dried ruts and I shut up. And she, in August heat, just sat, head cocked as if for chills hidden in the hot, damp breeze, as if they were a sound, time merely distance. O Death, I know exactly where it is— your sting. And, Grave, I know your victory. That night, around the tents, the boys caught fireflies, pinched them in half, and smeared them on their nails, then ran through pine-dark woods, waving their hands. All I could hear was laughter, shouts. And all that I could see for each one of my sons were ten blurs of faint, artificial light, never too far apart, and trembling. Like fairies, magic, sprites, they ran and shouted, “I’m not real! I’m not real!” The whole world fell away from me—perhaps I was still drunk— as on the night Titania told dazed Bottom, “Put off your human grossness so, and like an airy spirit go.” But even then the night could not hold long against the light, and light destroys roots, fog, lies, orchids, night, dawn stars, the moon, delusions, and most magic. And light sends into hiding owls, fireflies, and bats, whom for their unerring blunder, I adore the most of all night fliers. But owls, hid in a hickory, will hoot all day, and even the moon persists, like my hangover, some days till almost noon, drifting above the harsh, bright, murderous morning light—so blue, so valuable, so much like currency that if the moon were my blue coin, I’d never spend it.

is surely a peculiar answer for any teacher to receive when asking a kindergartner, but on second take, what word best describes me, crossbreed of butterfly and Super Fly aesthetics, other than peculiar? I suppose calling me a keen kid would also suffice in explaining my avidity for the kind of death that progresses the narrative of a gentling history, because that’s the only frame for greatness I seem to find for boys my shade and age to aspire to, short of having the height and hops to touch the rim, or the bulk and burst to break through the defensive line like a bullet. And, no, I haven’t given up on the prospect of Bulls starting shooting guard yet, but the God-fearer impressed upon me begs the mythology of goodness delivered to the multitudes like loaves and fish; how King is talked about in a black Christian tradition still in mourning over his lost rays of light, the way mentioning the name of Malcolm makes mice of shady white men some thirty years after the shotgun and he’s sung of as a prince: I want to evoke that level of pride in American democracy’s dark downtrodden because I know what it invokes in me, young and impressionable, watching Denzel’s mimicry for the one millionth time in my abbreviated existence — drawing an X on my undeveloped chest, pushing it out into the unknown-ahead hoping a Mecca for melanin rises from the man-shaped hole I’d left in my loved ones’ lives. I bet my parents would be so proud of me. I bet post offices would close on my birthday. I bet God would dap me up when I got up there and Jesus — dying on a cross to meet me.

Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling. — Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. by Stephen Mitchell The fresco cracks cooperatively over time. Not to give a secret away but gradually to break off keeping it. In the sky you make birds like this, one wing longer than the other, an asymmetrical v wedged against wind, one stroke longer than another, never the bodies turned the same direction, each finding its own angle, and one, in the distance, a dot. These are the Deadly Birds of the Soul Rilke was forced to call terrifying. Migratory, weighing no more than a pencil. Because every flying thing is passionate, and every flight a posture torn from stone. There was a time it was a theme parents would pay an artist to realize — the face of a beloved son, a Luca or Piero, painted onto the shoulders of Tobias, painted into the company of Raphael. You tell yourselves and your quiet house no harm will come to the boy as he goes out. A guardian, though, is not a guard. To keep safe is subtly different from confining. Radiance can strategically direct itself to seem like us, ready, as it were, to walk. As a mirror goes through the appearance of requiring subsistence, goes through the motions of a meal whose food appears to be food. Radiance, we know, is never quite as warm as light. Who has not tasted the silver in sea mist? Whosever they are, angels are the first to surface there. You know a guardian by the silver of a river-crossing, of a father’s filmy eyes, in gall, heart, fire, and mostly smoke. In smoke and mostly mirror. As, wedged between forward and backward being, rehashing and planning ahead, presence will be specked again with being erased, a reusable writing surface calling down to the life without rest, the self-propelled surveillances of sharks.