Renaissance

I'm going to cheat a bit on this post something every day challenge. This is a poem written over two decades ago, inspired by a movie. I will be most impressed if you can guess which film.

Renaissance

The window frames her against a peaceful landscape,

then a flutter and her skirt trails down the stairs.

She walks through the city streets

past squawking birds, carts of fruit,

vegetables and herbs, through crowds

and noise and dirt into your studio.

She sits as he asks her to sit.

She is what he wants her to be –

Magdalen with her bottle of oil.


The artist says: “My life has been

one long orgiastic dismemberment.

I grind myself into the pigment. I leave

my fingerprints in the paint,

every moment of self-loss

countered with brutal control.

It’s perverted, this transubstantiation.

How can you compare flesh and blood

with oil and pigment? All art is against

lived experience.


Magdalen is dead, and her savior

died in stylized brutality

centuries ago if it happened at all.

My memories are a series of paintings,

every gesture balanced against another,

every dark with its seed of light.”


While he counts her fee,

she yawns and stretches after such long immobility.

Outside she pauses in the doorway,

hair blown against the peeling frame,

the steps into the street where

her skirt stirs little clouds of dust.

It was a jolly good time, it was

Day two of this MoBlo or whatever it's called and I'm already scrambling. Inspiration or copier toner hit me this afternoon and I suddenly thought: "I wonder if I can find that old house I lived in back in the Summer of '89" So I tried. I think that the image below is what I knew as Brokengall Cottage, Widbury Hill, Ware, Hertforshire.


I have a very poor memory. All sorts of things are jumbled up - the little tudor building overhanging High Street (or was that in Hertford?), the pub that served elderberry wine, the canal that ran past the maltings, carrying with it a very distinctive fermenting smell. Actually, I thought it smelled a lot like cocaine, which just goes to show that I've always been adept at merging the old and the new.

I lived in Brockengall Cottage with my girlfriend, a fellow who epitomized the term "bloke" and a possibly malnourished Scottish lass. Only the bloke had a car, so every morning I got up and walked to my workplace through, I kid you not, a barley field. For the life of me I can't remember the name of the place where I worked - some council office. I processed student transport applications. The other folks there were involved in other aspects of transportation. There was the young Irishman who answered the transport information line. I'm not sure why they put someone who had no idea where he was in charge of advising callers on the best route between Ware and Much Haddam or St. Albans or wherever. But he had a charming accent. Also in the office were two old gents who drove double decker buses in London during the Blitz. I should have listened more carefully to their stories. They spent a lot of time fielding frantic questions from the Irishman, because they had all the routes memorized. The old guys were terribly worried that I wasn't seeing enough of England. I was young and had different ideas about entertainment, i.e. sex had a higher priority than the Tower of London.

During lunch I went to the little canteen, which was, for some reason, vegetarian. They served spaghetti on toast, beans on toast, cheese on toast. Pretty much anything on toast. I usually got an apple, walnut and honey sandwich.

Funny that I don't remember much about getting back and forth from the cottage to work, except for the mornings it rained and the barley field turned to sludge. I don't remember the walk back at all. How odd.

I think I drank most of what I earned. That seemed to be what everyone did. A pound a pint. I used to get something called a Snakebite (is it still called that?), half lager and half cider. Sometimes I had lager and lime instead. Then we would stagger along High Street. How we got home I can't imagine. Must have been the bloke. Anyway, the British take that designated driver stuff seriously.

I have this reminder of those days, a poem I wrote after I returned to New York:

Brokengall Cottage

I hear rain. No, it’s the farmer burning
his field. Smoke drags
along the ground, snagging
like wool in the stubble.
The horse’s hooves explode
against the gate. Nothing happens.
The fence is sturdy.
He snorts and butts all morning.
Locked in their pens
the dogs yelp and stumble.

Night moths fly through open
windows and drown in glass of water.
In darkness I hold
the glass to the moonlight.
Half-awake I once swallowed a moth.
But it stayed down. It stayed put.

In the days of the plague
corpses from London were dumped in the marsh
between this town and the next.
A tangle of bones
braced against a weight of mud.
Above, the smooth slates
of water spread undisturbed.

I saw the Lady of Shallot pinioned
in hyper-reality, menaced by detail –
the jeweled flowers, the chiseled leaves,
her revelation somewhere to my right.
As always the point of focus
was outside my field of vision.

I think of her when I stand by the canal.
Underwater weeds splay
like a drowned woman’s hair.

New York uncoils in the dream, knives
and teeth tear at the wildflowers
in the hearth.
The floorboards creak
with an unknown weight.
The restless dogs nip and worry
something that squeals.
Outside the door I find a rabbit’s foot
and, further toward the road,
the deflated carcass.

Jesus Is John Donne's Boyfriend

My mind has hopped on its little hamster wheel again. I’ve posted this before, sometime last fall. No one commented on it then, which either means it blows or no one came to visit that day. So I’m going to repeat it, with some alterations and additions. Actually, quite a bit of addition. And dammit I expect someone to say SOMETHING.


Jesus Is My Boyfriend, Jacobean Style

I love this poem. I love it so much I wish I could step back through history, find John Donne, and give him a jolly good time.

Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

I love his playful intellect, that double-edged sword. “Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend.” But it doesn’t of course; it keeps us captive. I relate so well to his frustration. You find out you're reason's love slave and there's damn all you can do about it except hope the Hero takes you by force.

How often do you hear someone talk about the peace that surpasses understanding? When we have serious problems, everyone prays for that. But exactly how do you find that peace—or put it another way—how do you let God establish that peace in you? I’m here God, ready to feel that peace. Bring it on, Jesus. Is that it? Sort of. Maybe. Wait, I don’t feel peaceful—all hell’s breaking loose. Am I missing something? I said I was happy to accept peace. More than ready. Sigh.

What does that peace look like? Serene? Calm? Stoic? Eye of the hurricane? How do you feel peace when your mind is always churning, synthesizing, analyzing. I take comfort that Jesus himself doesn’t seem all that calm to me. You don’t knock over tables and sweat blood because you have a serene nature, although he’s so often depicted as spouting wisdom with this sappy beneficent look on his face.

How are we supposed to feel God’s presence? Is it warm and fuzzy? Is it in the grass, the trees, our children, other people, the rocks, my computer, everything—or is that too pantheistic? And what about the shadow we see out of the corner of our eye—gone so fast maybe it wasn’t there at all. Frustratingly unknowable. Tantalizingly unknowable. We are always pushing out and reaching beyond and our hands close on air. We can’t stop thinking. We toss and turn, feel hemmed in and stifled, but don’t know how get out. And, if we can’t do it because it’s supposed to be all God’s work, well, we can turn that against ourselves, too. Gee, is that God now? Is He doing something? Am I feeling free? Wait, am I imagining all this? What if I’m imagining all this?

I love those last two lines “I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free/Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” I wonder if Donne felt a bit daring writing that? Maybe it was a commonplace expression of religious piety at the time. Hah. Any commentary will be quick to point you to the bridegroom imagery in the Bible, which I think is a bit weird in itself. Oh, yeah, that’s right – it’s about “spiritual” union. When confronted with wedding bed imagery, Biblical literalists suddenly discover metaphor. Because, of course, God doesn’t have a body, except in Jesus. And don’t even THINK about going there. Jesus doesn’t have a penis, at least not one that’s supposed to be called into service at any time.

And yet, there are those naughty, naughty mystics with their suggestive imagery. Oh, how the mainline protestants distrust the mystics, who make union with God sound like a really great shag.

I think of the statue of St. Theresa in ecstasy, and St. John of the Cross’s delirious poetry:

Upon my flowered breast,
For him alone kept fair,
There he slept
There I caressed,
There the cedars gave us air.

I drank the turret's cool air
Spreading playfully his hair.
And his hand, so serene,
Cut my throat.

Sweet! The love of God is like having your throat slit…after you fool around a bit in a turret!

Or Rumi:

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God’s fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.

Like this.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.

Well okey dokey, then! Knowing God as erotic seduction. There’s an explanation of miracles I can live with. Yep, I’m ready to give that a go.

And in Donne’s poem: “ravish” – which can mean “overcome by emotion” or… “rape.” Donne is asking God to rape him. How often do you ask God to rape you? Of course, if you ask, it isn’t really rape, is it? More like a “give it to me rough, sailor” kind of plea.

I often hear complaints about (or contempt for) Jesus Is My Boyfriend songs or Jesus Is My Boyfriend sentiments, mentality, and so forth. It's too me-focused, or bad theology, or too romantic, or too eroticized. It is pretty sappy and sounds like some sad consolation prize. You've signed that abstinence-only pledge, but you can still date Jesus. He's safe. I think the real problem is this: God isn’t the gentle purity-ring wearing boyfriend who’s going to nervously hold your hand and shyly ask permission for a kiss. You’d better be prepared for something a little more forceful.

Meander

(flawnt suggested I write something about obsession, so I gave it a try)

Things are a little out of hand. Information fills room after room after room. I have no bloody idea where I am. I have your photo, but the navigational coordinates are difficult to interpret. Where the hell are you, anyway? I don’t like mazes – too much like that Greek myth. Gee, you have remarkable eyes. I’m always struck by them. I’ve been known to hold my breath – it seems wrong to exhale. And you smile as if the world makes you happy. I’ve always liked that about you, how approachable you are, how unassuming. It’s adorable. Everyone says so. You don’t answer emails, though, and that’s a bit disappointing, a tiny imperfection. Did you know that every Persian carpet includes a flaw so as not to offend God? Did you know that you can track an IP address from an email? Of course, what do you do with an IP address? You have to be the CIA to take it farther. Do you think that artists have a divine calling? Do you think you have a divine calling? What would you call it, then? I think you are too modest, but it’s a charming quality. No wonder you’re so popular. Did you know that your entire life opens and unfolds like a map on the World Wide Web? Information fills room after room after room. Did I say that before? Your hair looks much better short, by the way. Long doesn’t suit you. You should always keep that in mind. I’ve been meaning to ask – how do you decide where to break a line of poetry? By syntax? Logic? Breath? Rhythm? Or is it purely by the way the text looks on the page? That always puzzles me, where to break. The lines just want to keep going and going and turn the corner and keep going... Sometimes the words get loose altogether and it’s a nightmare trying to impose order. It’s brutal, what that does to me. I’m not like everyone else, you see. I’m complicated. Whimsy has its place, but can’t you ever be serious? You really should be serious. This is a serious matter.

I know where you live.

Circling the Block

(way back in the day when I actually wrote, I took a class in poetic forms. this was one of my exercises, an attempt at a rondel)

Circling the Block

All the doors are closed
and I cannot bring myself to knock.
I’ve spent years circling the same block,
but what can I propose

to you? My lot is self-imposed
restraint. How can you unlock
the doors you’ve closed
when I cannot bring myself to knock.

Waiting in the street’s frozen
smile, my inane greetings mock
my loneliness. My life is blocked
with a need to always seem composed.
All the doors are closed
and I cannot bring myself to knock.

Sacrifice

The heavens wheel around the point of a knife,
a silver star ordering my life
and re-ordering my past.
I think it may always have been there.
He’s in one of his moods again,
old eyes cataracted with visions,
head tilted to listen.
I listen too,
listen close but hear nothing,
not even my own breathing,
not even my own heart.
He hears. He sways above me
and the world disappears.
He has the eyes of a fly,
in them I’m multiplied,
a brood of children who won’t cry NOT FAIR
when they’re roasted up like a holiday dinner.

Somehow I think this is my fault,
that my hands are bound
while his hands are free, holding the knife.

Lighthearted, sort of

Well, I may not have written a lot of jubilant poetry, but I did find one dating from a brief span of time when I was young, naive and deliriously happy somewhere in England.

Landscape

We climbed the spiraling
stairs to the castle tower.
There was a landscape I could not see;
it slid past my eyes like a scarf.
I would not look up
because it was like walking into the sky,
as if I had no body.
I would not look down
because it was like wanting to jump.

She told me
when she was a little girl
in search of forbidden sweets
she climbed the pantry shelves like a ladder
and tipped a jar of honey over her head.

She has fallen
into a rumpled sleep
on the cathedral grounds.
The heat is stunning;
blue bottles and bumble bees
stumble above her head.
She is wearing a dress
that dips in the back.
The sun stings there, along her shoulders
and behind her knees.

The cathedral bells are ringing
as if they had always been ringing.

Hiding

Under the bed I could see
into the boxsprings.
It spooked me, so I usually lay face down.
Frail slats of wood over ghost fabric,
the insides so painfully exposed,
tensed metal coils suspended over me.
I waited there for my father to come home,
to settle his rump in the living room sofa,
open his paper, turn on the TV.
Then he was as good as not there.
It was his arrival that startled me.
When the tires hit the gravel
I bolted like a criminal, a thief,
gathering myself up: toys, books,
whatever might recall me, buoy him too long
before he sank in his chair,
the jovial questions trailing his mouth
while he was already unfolding his paper,
reading the headlines,
almost not there, but holding.

Fever

….Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
~ Sylvia Plath, from "Black Rook in Rainy Weather"

I really do get sick of my childhood. It’s a parasite I can’t seem to get rid of. It always comes back to bite me. It’s like malaria. Now and then it acts up and I run a fever. And then I begin speaking all my disordered thoughts. I need a cool cloth and quinine.

By now, I can list all the things that went wrong. I can grasp it intellectually. I suppose that is where poetry came in. I could grasp it with my heart. I could hold it and shape it; I could burn and not be destroyed.

It is difficult to accept how ugly love can get, if it can be called love, but god knows I would rather it were some kind of love than no love at all. As long as they loved me and wouldn’t leave me, I could endure. Not that I had much choice.

I was a pawn in a war my parents fought, and I had to exchange my allegiance for protection or be left to fend for myself. And it all took place on an invisible battlefield. In the visible world I was taken care of. I wasn’t neglected. I wasn’t beaten. I received affection. I was praised and fussed over.

But in this other world I was an object, a prize, a substitute companion, and for my mother, an extension of herself. There was no privacy. If I kept a diary, my mother would read it. She was always trying to get inside my mind. My body wasn’t particularly private, either. If there was a way to invade, she would find it. She usually slept with me. Not as in incest, but she slept with me because she didn’t want to sleep with my father, and because I was terrified of the dark. I had frightening images of hands appearing from under my bed. You know that scene of Freddie Kruger impaling that sleeping fellow through the mattress. That seemed to have leapt straight out of my own mind. It’s a telling image, I suppose. Hands. disembodied, waiting to grab me

Since I was on “her side” my father pretty much abandoned interest, except when he wanted affection, which I was not very enthusiastic about. I tried to avoid any physical contact with him. That seemed essential. I sometimes actually hid in the closet or under the bed. Not when I was very small – I still liked him then -- but when I was older.

So I didn’t trust them an inch, and yet I was completely dependent on them. I wanted to be loved, yet I wanted them at arm’s length. I hated them enough to sometimes worry that I might go into some sort of trance and murder them, then come round and realize that I had no one to take care of me. I was both hypervigilant and forgetful. I can’t be hypnotized, ever. I wont’ go under. But I could also induce forgetfulness. In the middle of whatever horrible crap was going on, I would tell myself that I would forget it, just forget it, it wasn’t really happening, and someday I would look back and it would be a blank. I think I lost my entire junior year of high school that way.

And, oh, the self-loathing. I was sure there was something crucial wrong with me, a fatal flaw that wasn’t fatal enough. I was guilty of something, and if I could figure out what and be punished for it, things might be better. There had to be something I could confess, some humiliation I could endure, some sort of self-immolation I could attempt to undue the crime. I was guilty of simply existing. I wasn’t supposed to exist. Of course I developed my own means of self-punishment, and God knows I sometimes still wish relief were as simple as a slash across my arm. Sometimes the thought of it is as alluring as a kiss.

It’s a miracle I’ve been able to have any normal relationships at all. It is amazing that I ever let a man touch me, when I thought of it as an invasion, violent in and of itself. Actually, it seems to have taken two marriages to come to terms with that. And I had children, which I once thought would be akin to incubating an alien life form so that it could rip you apart.

But, I suppose it isn’t odd that my view of God is lacking in the areas of mercy, love, protection, and, well, fill in the blank. It’s hard to believe in God’s love if you think you are a mistake, and how could I not be a mistake?. And how could God let me be born into this household and leave me at the mercy of two crazy people, to be violated in a variety of ways? Yes, yes, I know – God loves us and has a purpose for us. I give an intellectual assent to all the positive traits of God, but I don’t trust him an inch.

The Whistle

Dad and I walked the paths outside the forest.
Vegetation grew shoulder high,
knots of grass and blackberry.
Bees and dragonflies flew as though draping
a heavy brocade of honeysuckle.
Dad showed me how to pluck a blossom,
touch its base to my lips and pull the stamen.
I licked a vague sweetness from the flower.
The sun lolled in the sky as though it would never move,
a stubborn sun that seemed to trap the day.
Streamers of coolness reached from the forest
like extended arms.
We did not follow that path
but stopped by a stripling tree,
wild cherry, Dad said, cutting a slim branch
with his pocket-knife and paring the bark.
Near one end he notched the wood
and I could see it was hollow, still green, a little damp.
It smelled like a forest; I could taste it on my tongue.
It released one clear piercing note of alarm.

When Poets Dream of Angels

“When the poets dreamed of angels, what did they see?
History lined up in a flash at their back.”
~ David Sylvian

I do not have the kind of bipolar that you see in movies. I don’t run around like a mad person, talking a mile a minute and then become catatonic. I have brief highs and then slide into depression and ennui. The depression is more persistent and severe than the high.

My manic probably looks much like someone else’s normal, at least to the outside observer.

Internally, it’s a firestorm.

I become entirely focused on something, usually to the point of obsession, perhaps for a couple of weeks. Then I falter. The obsession starts to evaporate, and I keep trying to hold onto it, because once it’s gone, the landscape is gray and uninteresting pointless. I drag myself around the drab landscape for a while until something new and shiny attracts my attention. For a while it was learning to knit. Then I dropped that. When we moved it was decorating – I spent a lot of time poring over books and paint colors – and then I lost interest. Recently it was summer camp.

Last weekend I could think of little else but poetry. I ransacked the house until I found my old papers and journals and dragged them out. I reread and shuffled and sorted. I began transcribing my old poems onto my computer. I drove Dear Husband nuts because I barely moved. Poems I didn’t remember writing. The dissertation reviews. Wow, I thought, my 22 year old self is just a fascinating mess. I can’t believe I stopped writing, blah blah blah. I’ll type it all up. I’ll put it all out there. Why not? This is kinda exciting. This is great!

At the same time, I’ve developed a strange and rather embarrassing obsession with Misha Collins and the composite of faith, doubt, rebellion, and wordspinner that he’s come to represent. I know far more about him than I will give a crap about in a month. I follow him on Twitter, which is itself the perfect haven for the frantically distracted and obsessed. There is always something new, always a reason to check. Misha happens to be very clever and amusing, spinning whimsical stories, which you wouldn’t think possible in Twitter. He's charming and at ease (of course, he's an actor) and everyone thinks he's just adorable. He is gifted and I am jealous. He writes poetry, and it's good poetry. Damn. He's bright and cheerful and good natured. He has thousands of followers. He doesn’t interact, but Twitter creates the illusion of giving you access to someone’s thoughts in real time, access to their daily life, or in this case, access to their creative life.

I’ve begun to falter.

The utter ridiculousness of being enthralled by some actor is a daily affront to my common sense. I feel ridiculous. I feel idiotic. I feel every one of my 43 years admonishing me to get a grip and pay attention to real life, my children, my husband, my job. It's not as if I can sit down with Misha Collins and pick his brain about poetry and the creative process. He plays an angel, but he's not carrying a message from God to me.

And the poetry. It seems so long ago and in another country. Far away. An island. I think I wrote to get high. It’s like being high. It must release endorphins. Each poem was an obsession. Nothing else was real until the poem was real. The world didn’t make sense without it. When I wrote the world was a bit sharper and I was a bit more buoyant, a bit more purposeful.

And I lost it.

I mentioned in a previous post that I have some ideas about why I crashed into a major writer’s block. But I’m not really so sure. I can’t untangle all the factors. The collapse of a relationship, the start of a new one, changing my persona for the world of jobs and careers, the desire for normality and stability, a dominant boyfriend/husband, antidepressants.

And, a not uncommon experience for me, feeling like a fraud.

I wrote confessional poetry. Much of it was filled with bitterness about my childhood, which sounds so passé and clichéd. I’m sure it bores the hell out of a lot of people. When you write confessional poetry you can’t really hide behind a persona. You’ve dumped your life out for all to see. Your demons are prancing on the pages. Everyone’s walking around in your psyche.

Near the end of my time in the writing program, I was sitting in workshop one day going through the hell of having one of my poems critiqued, when it dawned on me that my fellow poets and my instructors were talking about my poem as if I had been physically and sexually abused. I was dumbfounded, taken aback. I didn’t say a thing. I wasn’t sure whether to protest or pretend. Good God, I thought, how did I manage to screw this up? I went back through my poems and squirmed with discomfort. So many violent images, so many with sexual undertones. Taken alone, not so much, but together, bewildering. I was baffled and kind of horrified.

I didn’t experience some sort of aha moment, a revelation of a long buried trauma. I was never sexually or physically abused. I have to assume that the combination of verbal assaults, mental illness, extreme repression and shame engendered my sometimes over-the-top images. I felt that I had miscommunicated my entire life, that I should take out an ad or make a speech to set the record straight. It didn’t help that later one of my brothers told me a female cousin had accused my father of inappropriate behavior. I don’t believe that accusation. It doesn’t seem to fit. My father has many infuriating and undesirable traits, but I can’t think that is one of them.

But, you start to think, don’t you, that if it quacks like a duck, and so forth. There’s just that little bit of uncertainty. No, not possible. I would know. I wasn’t that good at disappearing.

Did that stop me in my tracks? Or am I just grasping for an explanation? I stopped trying to think about my past. When I went on antidepressants, I felt great. I felt so great that I eventually dropped both the antidepressants and the psychiatrist. That should have been a warning sign. I now know you don’t give a bipolar person Prozac – it triggers erratic behavior. I married an extremely ambitious man and hid in his shadow for years. I was thoroughly sick of hashing over my poor sad childhood. What did it matter? It didn’t help. It was getting boring. It was self-indulgent. Lots of people had it worse. I filled journals but I couldn’t write poetry. I struggled and flailed, mourned and grieved and finally stopped trying. Divorce, pregnancy, another marriage. I didn’t seem to be angry at my parents anymore. They were so remote, so harmless. I had children. I had things to do.

So here I am. I realize that I am still furious. Or rather I don’t realize it – it just comes out when I write. It’s obvious to everyone else. I mean, I know I have a temper and that I’m irritable, that I’m often moody and depressed, but I guess when I get going I fairly reek of brimstone. I’m still dogged by anger and self-loathing, and it can’t be medicated away. I haven’t a damn idea what to do about it. My therapist says I have to find some way, but she has no idea how, or maybe she just won’t tell me. Maybe she thinks it’s therapeutic for me to find out myself.

Meanwhile the world is starting to get that blunt look. Poetry, a clever actor who also happens to be a poet, hunger for that sort of creativity (Why can’t I be like you? Tell me how to be like you.) – what does it all matter? What do I think will change? My thoughts are shifting and settling like dust after a building collapses.

Exit

She enters in a new disguise.
The air falters
taken by surprise.
I rearrange myself.
The dress I have never seen before
it materialized in a different world.
She creates the illusion
that she has stepped out of hiding
though the black cloth falls like shadows
and black lines bind her eyes.
She moves in his admiration
as though she has rediscovered herself.
The corridor between us drops
like a bowl slipping from clenched fingers.

Cut

She holds the glass under
water to wash away all remains
of human contact. On the rim
where the lips touched, the curve
where the fingers pressed, her disgust
accumulates. She clenches the glass
suddenly no longer a glass
but a cloud of scythes,
one stuck in her hand like a burr.

A Month in the Country

He uncovered the eyes of God,
peeled back the blankness
to reveal the quick and the dead,
judged, falling.

What do you call Hell? she asked,
that the church bells wake us
to the roses no one ever sees,
the sun dazzling the graves,
the rain miring the battlefield,
the unexpressed want
pressed between pages in a prayer book.

Dead Poets Society

I used to write poetry. I used to do almost nothing but write poetry. I have an MFA from a bloody expensive, prestigious program. My thesis advisor was Daniel Halpern, editor-in-fucking-chief of Ecco Press. And I did jack with this, except repay the student loans (I'm still repaying the student loans). Once I had the degree, I couldn't write a damn thing. Ever. Again.

I might have a theory or two about why, but the main thing is that I never tried to get what I did write published and then I couldn't write at all. I recently dug up all those poems, and the useless thesis reviews (Thanks, Deborah Diggs, for the kudos. Sorry I just filed it away.) and thought, why not just post some of them here?

So, I will.

Seven

1. It’s easier to write dark than light. It is my gift to bring the dead to life.

2. I will take possession of all I see, love and grief and hope and art.

3. What you have I want. Your peace, sitting quietly with your heart.

4. The Furies, my pets, they howl and tear and spit you out bone by bone.

5. A slow weight, a heavy eye. Time slips through me and is gone.

6. I am so hungry and yet I barely taste. I have cleared the feast and guzzled the wine.

7. Now come here; let me rip the thoughts from your mind.

Black Psalm

When sorrow falls on your plate
with the clatter of dropped coins,
how do you ask a blessing on that meal?
How do you consume it,
how does it nourish and delight?
What do I taste and see –
sand and entrails.
Your will is like fog,
the shroud of accidents.
God, I do not trust you.
You give with one hand
and take with the other
and call it fallen creation.
You ask for blood
and speak love.
Your justice is ugly and unrighteous,
a knife at the neck of a small child
to test our loyalty.
Then you beam like the sun –
See, it’s all okay now –
it’s all mercy now.
See how I love you?
The enemy armies have been laid waste
and left to rot in the fields.
Now you can build your house on rock.

Jesus Is My Boyfriend: Jacobean Style

I can’t stop mulling over that Donne poem. In case you missed it, here it is again:

Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.


One of the reasons I like Donne is his playful intellect, that double-edged sword. “Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend.” But it doesn’t of course; it keeps us captive. I can relate to the frustration he expresses.

How often do you hear someone talk about the peace that surpasses understanding? When we have serious problems, everyone prays that for us. But exactly how do you find that peace—or put it another way—how do you let God establish that peace in you? I’m here God, ready to feel that peace. Bring it on. Is that it? Sort of. Maybe. Wait, I don’t feel peaceful—all hell’s breaking loose. Am I missing something? I said I was happy to accept peace. More than ready. Sigh.

What does that peace look like? Serene? Calm? Stoic? Eye of the hurricane? How do you feel peace when your mind is always churning, synthesizing, analyzing. I take comfort that Jesus himself doesn’t seem all that calm to me. You don’t knock over tables and sweat blood because you have a serene nature. He’s not the Christian version of Buddha, although he’s always depicted as spouting wisdom with this sappy beneficent look on his face.

How are we supposed to feel God’s presence? Is it warm and fuzzy? Is it in the grass, the trees, our children, other people, the rocks, my computer, everything—or is that too pantheistic? And what about the shadow we see out of the corner of our eye—gone so fast maybe it wasn’t there at all. Frustratingly unknowable. Tantalizingly unknowable. We are always pushing out and reaching beyond and our hands close on thin air. No wonder Donne asks God to get him out of the arranged marriage with reason. We toss and turn in reason, feel hemmed in and stifled, but don’t know how get out. And, if we can’t do it because it’s supposed to be all God’s work, well, we can turn that against ourselves, too. Gee, is that God now? Is He doing something? Am I feeling free? Wait, am I imagining all this? What if I’m imagining all this?

I love those last two lines “I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free/Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” I wonder if Donne felt a bit daring writing that? Maybe it was a commonplace expression of religious piety. Hah. Any commentary will be quick to point you to the bridegroom imagery in the Bible and the Song of Solomon, but it’s still a weird concept. That’s supposed to be the model for a relationship with Christ? It seems so . . . carnal. Honestly, when you read Song of Solomon, do you really think, “This is about the church as the bride of Christ”? It doesn’t exactly calm the senses. Anyway, in pondering all this in my haphazard, non-systematic way, I happened across this link that features a very interesting quote from Ronald Rolheiser.

I wasn’t familiar with Rolheiser. He seems to have rubbed a few people the wrong way, which I find delightful. So I checked out a book called The Restless Heart, which addresses loneliness and the insatiable human longing for connection and meaning. Rolheiser seems to think that we’ll be having sex in heaven, and I’m not quite sure if he means that as a metaphor. It definitely makes heaven sound a lot more interesting that standing around singing and strumming a lyre.