Fire Sermon

by Jamie Quatro

  What I really wish I could do is write poetry.

  We’d welcome an excuse to visit. Is Teresa Caffe still in Palmer Square? Our favorite Italian. And Chez Alice (those croissants!)?

  Yours,

  Maggie

  Dear Maggie,

  So you’ve studied here—all the more reason to get you back. My wife and I will treat you to dinner at Teresa, still here, yes, and our favorite as well. If all else fails, I’ve just been invited to give a lecture and teach a one-day workshop during a conference in Nashville next summer. Normally I decline such invitations—I find conferences distracting from the real work, and one comes away with a warped perception of one’s importance. But there’s something in the timing of the invitation, don’t you think? Perhaps we’re fated to meet.

  In the meantime, let’s keep talking. Have you read Fanny Howe’s Indivisible? I think you’d love it. May I send you a copy? Give me your address and I’ll put it in the mail.

  Yours,

  JA

  Dear James,

  No, I haven’t read it, and yes, I’d love a copy. Address below.

  I was invited to the same conference. Local girl makes it big, haha. Never mind that almost no one I know has actually read the book.

  I will look forward to seeing you there, if not sooner.

  Yrs, ME

  Dear ME:

  Ah, the casual self-deprecation in your initials signoff. Me. Brilliant.

  Here’s the book. Write when you’re finished. I’ll be curious to know what you make of McCool in that closet.

  Yrs, JA

  p.s. —forgive my handwriting, I’ve never been good at The Pen. I suspect it’s why I became a poet; one traffics in single words. I do feel an immense gratitude for being born into the Era of the Handheld Writing Utensil. Had I been born into the keyboard generation I might have ended up—the horror—a novelist.

  Winters settle over the neighborhood, wet cloudy mornings, bright frigid afternoons, sometimes enough snow to get out the disc sleds and toboggans and head to the golf course, where families gather at the top of a steep hill. Hoots and hollers, frozen toes, tears, wet scarves, lost mittens. Fathers coast down with bright-cheeked toddlers nestled between their legs. Mothers with carafes of hot chocolate and tins of marshmallows huddle near cars, discussing travel plans and Christmas gifts.

  Cooped up in the house, the dog compulsively rubs his muzzle along the front of the couch cushions. The son, dressed for a class Christmas party, slides down the banister. A balustrade snaps, the rail gives way, and he falls, fracturing his wrist. The husband drives the old gray cat to the vet twice a week for IV fluids, a low growl coming from the carrier in the backseat. Hey, Mr. Smokes, hey, old boy, hang in there. You’ve been a good cat, a good faithful cat. You’ve redeemed your species. You are so much better than I ever could have imagined you’d be, the husband says into the windshield, dragging his shirt cuff across his eyes.

  A crack appears in the drywall where heights are marked in pencil, crayon, and marker—an ill-chosen spot, southern-exposed, the lower marks already disappearing. Wedgwood plates lined on a kitchen shelf grow furred with dust. A leaky dishwasher swells the underpinnings of the wood floor, until one morning a single plank heaves up and the daughter stubs a toe rinsing her cereal bowl. The hinges on the swinging door between the kitchen and dining room loosen. One day, when the dog crosses the threshold, the door swings suddenly shut on his tail. The dog yelps and instantly soils himself.

  Down in the basement mildew eats into a jogging stroller’s fabric, dark spots beginning to coalesce and multiply, until the great silent rending as a section of fabric slips from the frame and dangles wildly, for a moment, into open space.

  Days grow warmer. The sledders at the golf course disappear. In the watery light of spring one hears only the whish and ping of drivers off tees, the whir of golf carts, the gentle pock of putters on clipped greens, flags snapping at the tips of their poles.

  From: Margaret Ellmann

  Date: July 21, 2014, 10:16 AM

  To: James K. Abbott

  Subject: poems attached

  Dear James:

  It was so great to meet you, finally, and spend time with you here in Nashville. Thanks for making a day of it with me.

  As promised, a poem. Two of them, in fact. Caveat: they’re bad. I’m a beginner. You must picture me at your feet, an apprentice eager to learn.

  Yrs, ME

  The Withholding

  Time for goodbye, father said.

  I thought my uncle would say it,

  but he said, No—we are the ones.

  Beside a slatted blind, his arm lifted

  and lifted from the wrist as if drawn

  by a string. Father slid to the linoleum,

  back to the wall. When he asked,

  Why’s he doing that?

  he was his baby brother.

  Reaching, the nurse said, for his

  loved ones waiting.

  I tried to feed him a sip of water.

  He clamped the cut straw between

  his teeth, where it stuck out—

  rakish, like a cigar.

  The nurse squeezed his cheeks

  until the straw tumbled onto his

  sheeted chest. Only if they ask, she said.

  In the family lounge, I didn’t weep

  because I would miss him.

  It was the water, that straw.

  The fierce mercy of withholding.

  Protestant Worshipper in Catedral Nogales, Sonora, Mexico

  Veronica is lovely. She wipes the dust from Christ’s face in the carving

  beside Simon, though she is never mentioned in the Gospels.

  I watch a woman bald with cancer glue tiny silk roses to the hands, feet,

  and side of the body hanging on the crucifix. Healing is the end

  of all things. Inside the cathedral, the congregants wear collared shirts

  and panty hose. Tomorrow they will sweep floors, pick cabbage.

  We are no strangers to ritual. Some of us descend into rivers, enact death,

  burial, and resurrection, a little embarrassed by our wet hair.

  From: James K. Abbott

  Date: July 21, 2104, 4:21 PM

  To: Margaret Ellmann

  Subject: RE: poems attached

  Dear Maggie:

  These poems aren’t bad. Not by a long shot. The first is quite stunning, the payoff of the final line, which lands just right. Yeats’s box clicking shut.

  The second one is also good. I’ve done a bit of tweaking. See what you think.

  I think often and fondly of our day in Nashville. Can we figure out a way to have a redux?

  Yrs, JA

  Dear James,

  I feel like a caricature artist showing her sketches to da Vinci! But I like your tweaks. Thank you for taking time with these. For taking them seriously. They’re straightforward but that’s probably the only kind of “poetry” I’ll ever be able to manage. Who was it that said everyone wants to be a poet? And when they fail they try to write stories; and, failing at that, they give up and write a novel … Faulkner? Updike?

  We do need a redux. I’d love to meet Beth. If only we lived closer.

  I’ve been reading Lewis’s sermons in The Weight of Glory. The one on transposition—do you know it? This idea that the language of faith is a translation from a higher system to a lower. Pepys wrote in his diary that when he was sick with aesthetic pleasure, it was the same way he felt when he was amorous with his wife, or sick with the flu. In other words, the emotions were vastly different but their biological manifestations were identical. Of course the physical system is … clunkier, I suppose. Less complex than the emotional. So the lower system (physical) has to rely on the same mechanisms to express the complexities of the higher (emotion, psychology). Same with playing a piece written for orchestra on the piano: the keys must stand for flutes, violins, cellos, etc.

  And so with the language of the sacred texts
. Is it any wonder, Lewis writes, that the Bible can furnish nothing better for an Apocalypse than jewels, music, crowns and thrones—the same old stuff from our terrestrial existence? You see this in the mystics, too, especially the medieval women visionaries. Erotic language employed in the service of a love that’s far from sexual. Hadewijch, Beatrijs of Nazareth, Mechthild of Magdeburg. Angela of Foligno especially (her vision of love coming toward her as a penetrating sickle!) The point is that we inhabit the lower order, so when the higher tries to get in it can only be transposition. But to dismiss the higher order because the images seem childish would be to refuse to look at a painting because it uses only two dimensions. We wouldn’t think of it. We understand the translation.

  I might write something about this. Maybe that post-Christian-America essay after all.

  It’s nice, writing to you like this. I don’t know if I told you, when we were in Nashville, that Thomas doesn’t really go in for anything religious? He’s totally supportive. But talking about God with someone who takes it seriously—well, it’s something I didn’t know I was missing and now that it’s happening I realize how absolutely starved I was.

  Yrs, ME

  p.s.: I finally finished the Howe. McCool locked in that closet! Of course one thinks of every repression metaphor. But the way his imprisonment cages her is what’s heartbreaking. She hasn’t accomplished a thing, locking him in there.

  Dear Maggie,

  Da Vinci could have used some pointers from a caricature artist!

  I love that sermon, “Transposition.” He gave it on Pentecost. One of his best. That, and “Is Theology Poetry?” I’m guessing you’ve got that one memorized. He’s right—evolution is the more poetic idea, the fragile cell struggling upward, across millions of years against impossible odds and the certainty of extinction when the sun burns out. Tragic.

  Yes, the medieval women visionaries. What I’ve always found fascinating in Mechthild of Magdeburg (now there’s a throatful) is her desire for an erotic relationship with both Christ and the Virgin. Her intuitive understanding that spiritual longing transcends binary concepts of masculine and feminine. And how she gives Christ dual gender roles: mother, sustainer, from whom she wishes to drink blood (so much blood in these visions) but also as one to whom she’s eager to submit, and from whom she wants to … well. Receive his potency, so to speak.

  As for getting together with Beth. She’s warm and wonderful and smart. But she’s funny about meeting my writer friends. She’d rather I talk shop when she’s not around. Now, if we could talk landscape architecture … Did I tell you she’s designing a park for the blind? First one of its kind in the state. Braille on the undersides of handrails, along the edges of slides, on the chains of swings. Flowers selected for scent signatures.

  I’ve been listening—obsessively listening—to Bach’s English and French Suites. It’s doing something for me, metrically. I mean for my work. Watch the attached clip, Glenn Gould playing a gigue I love. (You know about his custom chair?)

  Happy to chat about the poems on the phone, if you’d like. A live voice is much superior to this polished digital medium. Even handwritten letters would be better. I miss the cross-outs, the undisguised mess of rehearsal. Email is convenient but one gets (and gives) something akin to a performance.

  Yrs, JA

  p.s.: send more poems?

  Parent meetings, medical forms, class photos, permission slips. Organelles. Passive versus active transport. Plant cell, animal, hypo, hyper, exo, endo. Periodic table. (A man behind iron bars gets out of prison, the son says, and when he’s outside the gate, he goes, Finally, I’m fee. Iron, FE. It’s a mnemonic.) Let me not to the marriage of true minds a rose by any other name if we spirits have offended out out brief candle. A-squared plus B-squared sine cosine line plane slope distance formula. Je suis tu es il/elle est nous sommes vous êtes ils/elles sont censure guile parsimony recalcitrant diffidence prosaic gravity electromagnetic strong nuclear weak nuclear Higgs boson dark matter multiverse theory wave-function collapse Polyphemus Odysseus George Lennie Daisy Tom Gatsby Atticus Scout Huck Jim Hester Prynne Ralph Simon Jack Piggy Ministry of Truth Manor Farm World State Savage Reservation Big Brother is watching you’re all a bunch of phonies. When in the course of human events we the people in order to form a more perfect four score and seven years 1492 1517 1776 1865 1914-18 1929 1939-45 1969 1989 1991 2001. Hitler Mussolini Churchill Warsaw. Dachau. Auschwitz.

  The daughter studies, draws, practices the piano; she sings, warming up her voice to the highest notes. Ring-ee-yah, ah ah ah ah. Her friend calls the mother, after their senior class trip to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. I have to tell you something, Mrs. Ellmann, she says. You know how Kate wears all those bracelets? You should look underneath. I don’t know why I do it, Mom, Kate says. I just feel sad and guilty all the time. Like I should be doing more. Or less. I don’t know. Pediatrician, nutrition specialist, therapist. She seems to think a 4.0 is the expectation, Dr. Pierson says, the bare minimum. They finally give in to medication and within a month the daughter is happy again. Why’d we wait so long? Maggie says, her head on Thomas’s chest. Are we terrible parents? I guess you learn along the way, Thomas says.

  SATs, ACTs, college tours, early action, early decision, demonstrated interest, interviews. Tell us one thing you’ve done that’s had national impact. Tears. A sunny fall day in Boston, crisp. On the tour the daughter buys a sweatshirt in the bookstore and wears it all weekend. They walk the Freedom Trail to the Italian district, passing impromptu bands, people in Halloween costumes handing out candy. The daughter is flushed and beaming, eating her calzone. I absolutely love it here, she says.

  From: Margaret Ellmann

  Date: July 23, 2014, 9:17 AM

  To: James K. Abbott

  Subject: RE: poems attached

  Dear James,

  Totally understand re: Beth. I would never want to impose. Her park sounds fantastic, and important. Thomas, too, can be a bit protective, or threatened. Those aren’t the right words. He’s brilliant and respected in his field. Right now he’s helping a company develop a ten-year IPO and merger and acquisition plan. Or something like that. I wish I could tell you more about his work, but I find the language of business inaccessible.

  I play that gigue. Years of piano lessons, still with me. It’s a lovely little piece. The lightness of the voice on top twining with the heavy anchor of the left hand—and then the way the voices trade places, the layering creating a kind of third voice. And the gorgeous fusion in the final chord.

  Gould’s a genius. My parents saw him live once and walked out. It was awful, my mother said, the way he kept buzzing and humming, how could anyone stand it?

  She had no idea who they’d walked out on!

  A couple more attached. Help.

  Yrs, ME

  Foreknowledge

  A man outside a bookstore

  The tattooed wrist

  Draws her toward him

  Down into him

  As into the pinions of a wing

  All those years sealed

  The wax

  His mouth would break

  She looks away

  They know how it will be

  She lies down

  He tells her to lie down

  Prayer

  I asked to be where no storms blew.

  Silence. So I asked for only a little rain,

  Some wind, lightning, maybe thunder,

  Hail even, but nothing more.

  I said, At least you owe me this.

  Rooftops blown off the city, felled

  wires, blacked-out blocks, swath-cut

  fields, tossed-over trailers, trees uprooted

  like breech births. The city, fucked—

  my house still standing,

  the only one still standing.

  In late July they drive to Lake Rabun, in the North Georgia Mountains. One of their last family trips before Kate leaves for college. A friend from work has given Thomas the key
s to his custom lake house: three stories, exterior walls of glass facing the lake, a two-slip boathouse with a sundeck on its roof. The main entrance is on the third floor, a kitchen and living area furnished minimally, natural hardwoods, white linens, stainless steel. This place is sick, Tommy says. He strips to his boxers, runs down the steep staircase to the boathouse, and stands on the deck railing, whooping before plugging his nose and jumping off.

  Thomas grins at Maggie and Kate, peels off his shirt, and does the same.

  Kate watches them from the living room windows. I think these open, she says. Together, she and Maggie fold the doors into pleats, until there’s nothing between them and the lake but a narrow balcony and a thin row of pine trees. The water glints jade in the noon sunlight. They change into swimsuits and walk down to the sundeck. The boys have already pulled out the stand-up paddleboards and are jousting, each trying to knock the other off. Kate looks over the edge of the rail.

  How far a drop is it? she asks Maggie.

  Twenty-five feet, maybe? Maggie says.

  Well, I’m getting in like a normal person, Kate says, walking down to the dock and using the ladder. Thomas and Tommy fling water at her with their oars. Stop, it’s freezing! she cries, slipping underwater. From above, Maggie watches the muscles in Thomas’s back flare as he paddles up to Kate and jumps off his board, helping her climb on. He looks up.

  Fifty bucks and dishes for a week if you jump, he calls.

  Do it, Mom, jump! Tommy and Kate cry. Their slicked-back hair, the familiar shapes of their skulls—always she is startled, seeing them after a swim, or just out of the shower, by the layering of the past in their faces: baby, toddler, and child in palimpsest beneath the teenagers.