by Carl Dennis
There in the snow are seed husks. Think
As you circle down how blessed you are.”
But what can he point to in the nun’s spare cell
To keep her from wondering why it’s so hard
For the king of heaven to comfort her?
All she can manage now is to hope for the will
Not to abandon her god, if he is her god,
In his hour of weakness. No time to reply
To the tender homily at her bedside
As she gathers all her strength for the end,
Hoping to cry out briefly as Jesus did
When his body told him he was on his own.
Department Store
“Thou shalt not covet,” hardest of the Commandments,
Is listed last so the others won’t be neglected.
An hour a day of practice is all that anyone
Can expect you to spare, and in ten years’ time
You may find you’ve outgrown your earlier hankering
For your neighbor’s house, though his is brick
And yours is clapboard, though his contains a family.
Ten years of effort and finally it’s simple justice
To reward yourself with a token of self-approval.
Stand tall as you linger this evening
In the sweater section of Kaufmann’s Department Store
By the case for men not afraid of extravagance.
All will go well if you hold your focus steady
On what’s before you and cast no covetous eye
On the middle-aged man across the aisle
In women’s accessories as he converses quietly
With his teenaged son. The odds are slim
They’re going to reach agreement about a gift
Likely to please the woman they live with,
Not with the clash in what they’re wearing,
The father dapper in sport coat and tie, the son
Long-haired, with a ring in his ear and a shirt
That might have been worn by a Vandal chieftain
When he torched a town at the edge of the Empire.
This moment you covet is only a truce
In a lifelong saga of border warfare
While each allows the other with a shake of the head
To veto a possibility as they slowly progress
From umbrellas to purses, from purses to gloves
In search of something bright for the darker moments
When the woman realizes her life with them
Is the only life she’ll be allotted.
It’s only you who assumes the relief on their faces
When they hold a scarf to the light and nod
Will last. The boy will have long forgotten this moment
Years from now when the woman he’s courting
Asks him to name a happy time with his dad,
A time of peaceable parley amidst the turmoil.
So why should you remember? Think how angry
You’ll be at yourself tomorrow if you let their purchase
Make you unhappy with yours, ashamed
Of a sweater on sale that fits you well,
Gray-blue, your favorite color.
Not the Idle
It’s not the idle who move us but the few
Often confused with the idle, those who define
Their project in life in terms so ample
Nothing they ever do is a digression.
Each episode contributes its own rare gift
As a chapter in Moby-Dick on squid or hardtack
Is just as important to Ishmael as a fight with a whale.
The few who refuse to live for the plot’s sake,
Major or minor, but for texture and tone and hue.
For them weeding a garden all afternoon
Can’t be construed as a detour from the road of life.
The road narrows to a garden path that turns
And circles to show that traveling goes only so far
As a metaphor. The day rests on the grass.
And at night the books of these few,
Lined up on their desks, don’t look like drinks
Lined up on a bar to help them evade their troubles.
They look like an escort of mountain guides
Come to conduct the climber to a lofty outlook
Rising serene above the fog. For them the view
Is no digression though it won’t last long
And they won’t remember even the vivid details.
The supper with friends back in the village
In a dining room brightened with flowers and paintings
No digression for them, though the talk leads
To no breakthrough. The topic they happen to hit on
Isn’t a ferry to carry them over the interval
Between soup and salad. It’s a raft drifting downstream
Where the banks widen to embrace a lake
And birds rise from the reeds in many colors.
Everyone tries to name them and fails
For an hour no one considers idle.
Gelati
These songs from the corner church,
Wafting through the window this August morning,
Lift the job of sanding my scarred oak bookcase
From a three, on a ten-point scale of joy,
To at least a four. Not a bad grade
For an enterprise mainly practical, preparing a site
Fittingly handsome for the noble shelf-load
Of Roman Stoics whose sensible pages,
Stacked now on my speakers, don’t register on the joy chart.
A cold wind blows from their doctrine that a virtuous life
Is in harmony with the cosmos—the cold, companionless cosmos
That never comes through when you need a friend.
No wonder the early Christians won followers.
No wonder their living descendants sound joyful still
As they proclaim that even here, near the corner
Of Hodge and Elmwood, the soul may be quickened.
These singers have had a brush with vision
Denied me so far, though once, on the Appian Way,
Three miles outside of Rome, after I’d walked for hours,
Inspecting the roadside tombs, alone, in the heat of August,
Wishing I’d brought a water jug, ready to turn back,
A man pushing a cart suddenly staged an advent
As he intoned, “Limonata, gelati,” as if to a crowd
Though the road was empty. An old man
With a bright escutcheon of ice cream staining his apron,
Proclaiming that to ask is to have for the lucky few
Who know what to ask for.
For a minute it seemed the Bureau of Joy was calling
About a windfall blowing my way to guarantee
An eight or nine on the joy chart even if many wishes
Down on my list wouldn’t be granted.
Today I seem to be focusing on my wish to sand
And stain and varnish my bookcase, a job that a monk
Who specializes in repetition might embrace as a ritual.
Let the moment expand, he says to himself,
Till time is revealed to be delusion.
For me, here in the passing hour,
The wind-borne singing brightens the moment
However faintly it enters, however it might be improved
By the brighter acoustics of the New Jerusalem.
And now it’s time for a string quartet in a new recording.
And now it’s time for the baseball game on the radio.
Whether the players regard the sport as joy
Or simply as work, the crowd seems alive
With the wish to compress a lifetime
Down to a single sitting. Now for the task
Of brushing the varnish on with a steady hand
While the crowd goes wild in the bottom of the ninth
As the man on first steps off the bag, a rookie
Who’ll seem a savior if he gets home.
To a Pagan
It’s sad to see you offer your prayers to the sun god
And then, when you really need him, discover too late
That though he’s willing to help, other gods more potent
Decide against him. It’s too late then to regret
You didn’t invest your trust where we’ve invested.
Join us, and if help doesn’t arrive at once,
At least the deputy angel assigned your district
May hear your groans in the wind and track them
Down to your attic apartment in the outskirts
And mark the coordinates on her map.
Then she’s off on the long trek through the voids
To report the crisis. Imagine the vault of the stars
As a tundra stretching away for a million miles
Without so much as a hut for shelter,
Without a tree or a bush for a windbreak.
Imagine how lonely she is as she builds a fire
Of tundra grass in the mouth of a cave,
A fire that proves too small and smoky
To warm her icy plumage. Then add her voice
As she quakes a psalm to keep up her spirits.
Dwelling on her, your heart will fill with compassion
And you’ll want to cry out, “Great friend, I’m thankful
For all you suffer for my sake, but I’m past help.
Help someone more likely to benefit,” the prayer
Of a real convert, which is swiftly answered.
History
I too could give my heart to history.
I too could turn to it for illumination,
For a definition of who we are, what it means to live here
Breathing this atmosphere at the end of the century.
I too could agree we aren’t pilgrims
Resting for the night at a roadside hermitage,
Uncertain about the local language and customs,
But more like the bushes and trees around us,
Sprung from this soil, nurtured by the annual rainfall
And the slant of the sun in our temperate latitudes.
If only history didn’t side with survivors,
The puny ones who in times of famine
Can live on nothing, or the big and greedy.
If only it didn’t conclude that the rebels who take the fort
Must carry the flag of the future in their knapsacks
While the rebels who fail have confused their babble
With the voice of the people, which announces by instinct
The one and only path to posterity.
The people are far away in the provinces
With their feet on the coffee table
Leafing through magazines on barbecuing and sailing.
They’re dressing to go to an uncle’s funeral,
To a daughter’s rehearsal dinner. They’re listening,
As they drive to work, to the radio.
Caesar’s ad on law and order seems thoughtful.
Brutus’s makes some useful points about tyranny.
But is either candidate likely to keep his promises?
When ice floes smashed the barges on the Delaware
And Washington drowned with all his men, it was clear
To the world the revolt he led against excise taxes
And import duties was an overreaction.
When the South routed the North at Gettysburg
It was clear the scheme of merchants to impose their values
On cotton planters was doomed from the start
Along with Lincoln’s mystical notion of union,
Which sadly confused the time-bound world we live in
With a world where credos don’t wear out.
School Days
On the heart’s map of the country, a thousand miles
May be represented by a quarter inch, the distance
Between St. Louis and a boarding school in Massachusetts
Where the son will be taught by the same teachers
Who taught his father and will reappear Christmas
At Union Station singing his father’s songs.
Likewise the distance walked by an immigrant mother
From the tenement on Locust to the school on Seventh
Equals the distance on the heart’s map of the world
Between the Volga and the Mississippi.
Now she’s left the children at the school door
And has watched them enter a country she’ll never visit
From which they’ll return this evening with stories
She won’t be able to understand. And on weekends,
When she and her husband fill their one big room
With the clatter of piecework, the children wait for a seat
In the reading room of the Cass Avenue library
Where a book is a ship, its prow pointed toward Ithaca.
A thousand kisses to you, Miss Winslow, senior librarian,
With a slice of poppy-seed cake that Mother made
For your help in boarding and raising the sails.
Now for the lotus-eaters and witches, princesses, gods,
Not one of which leaves Odysseus at a loss for words.
And all the words in English, a language stiff as a stone
On the tongue of the oldsters but flexible for the children.
What skill could be more useful than making a stranger
A friend with a single speech or tricking a giant
Eager to eat you? The boring parts can be skimmed
Like the trip to shadow land, where the hero has to sit still
And listen to the sad stories of shadows.
Three times he tries to embrace his mother,
Who pined away with longing for her lone son
Wandering far from home, buffeted by the sea god.
Three times he embraces only air.
Prophet
You’ll never be much of a prophet if, when the call comes
To preach to Nineveh, you flee on the ship for Tarshish
That Jonah fled on, afraid like him of the people’s outrage
Were they to hear the edict that in thirty days
Their city in all its glory will be overthrown.
The sea storm that harried Jonah won’t harry you.
No big fish will be waiting to swallow you whole
And keep you down in the dark till your mood
Shifts from fear to thankfulness and you want to serve.
No. You’ll land safe at Tarshish and learn the language
And get a job in a countinghouse by the harbor
And marry and raise a family you can be proud of
In a neighborhood not too rowdy for comfort.
If you’re going to be a prophet, you must listen the first time.
Setting off at sunrise, you can’t be disheartened
If you arrive at Nineveh long past midnight,
On foot, your donkey having run off with your baggage.
You’ll have to settle for a room in the cheapest hotel
And toss all night on the lice-ridden mattress
That Jonah is spared. In the space of three sentences
He jumps from his donkey, speaks out, and is heeded, while you,
Preaching next day in the rain on a noisy corner,
Are likely to be ignored, outshouted by old-clothes dealers
And fishwives, mocked by schoolboys for your accent.
And then it’s a week in jail for disturbing the peace.
There you’ll have time, as you sit in a dungeon
Darker than a whale’s belly, to ask if the trip
Is a big mistake, the heavenly voice mere mood,
The mission a fancy. Jonah’s biggest complaint
Is that God, when the people repent and ask forgiveness,
Is
glad to forgive them and cancels the doomsday
Specified in the prophecy, leaving his prophet
To look like a fool. So God takes time to explain
How it’s wrong to want a city like this one to burn,
How a prophet’s supposed to redeem the future,
Not predict it. But you’ll be left with the question
Why your city’s been spared when nobody’s different,
Nobody in the soup kitchen you open,
Though one or two of the hungriest
May be grateful enough for the soup to listen
When you talk about turning their lives around.
It will be hard to believe these are the saving remnant
Kin to the ten just men who would have sufficed
To save Gomorrah if Abraham could have found them.
You’ll have to tell them frankly you can’t explain
Why Nineveh is still standing though you hope to learn
At the feet of a prophet who for all you know
May be turning his donkey toward Nineveh even now.
Delphi
Though I don’t believe in oracles, I’m encouraged
By those who do, by their certainty that the future,
However narrow, isn’t so closed as the past.
Options appear to persist for the passengers
Disembarking at the port of Corinth, persist as they rest
Before the jolting donkey ride up the mountain
And the long wait for their turn on the porch of the temple.
The farmer fresh from his farm on the island of Melos
Can’t predict what the priestess will answer
When asked the wisest policy toward his son,
Though he knows what he wants her to say:
That the boy has studied enough in Athens,
That another year means losing him to philosophy