no kitchens on the run, no striking camp …
we moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching … on the hike …
we found new tactics happening each day:
we’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
and stampede cattle into infantry,
then retreat through hedges
where cavalry must be thrown.
Until … on Vinegar Hill … the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
and in August … the barley grew up out of our grave.
The Haw Lantern (Dedication)2
The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.
Ted Kooser (b. 1939)
At the Office Early3
Rain has beaded the panes
of my office windows,
and in each little lens
the bank at the corner
hangs upside down.
What wonderful music
this rain must have made
in the night, a thousand banks
turned over, the change
crashing out of the drawers
and bouncing upstairs
to the roof, the soft
percussion of the ferns
dropping out of their pots,
the ballpoint pens
popping out of their sockets
in a fluffy snow
of deposit slips.
Now all day long,
as the sun dries the glass,
I’ll hear the soft piano
of banks righting themselves,
the underpaid tellers
counting their nickels and dimes.
Selecting a Reader1
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.
David Budbill (b. 1940)
Dilemma1
I want to be famous so I can be humble about
being famous.
What good is my humility when I am stuck
in this obscurity?
The Three Goals2
The first goal is to see the thing itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
No symbolism please.
The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.
The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.
Thomas M. Disch (b. 1940)
The Cardinal Detoxes: A Play in One Act1
We are a sinful church. We are naked. Our anger, our pain, our anguish,
our shame, are clear to the whole world.
—The Most Reverend Alphonsus L. Penney,
D. D., Archbishop of St. John’s,
Newfoundland, in his statement of
resignation July 18, 1990
The scene is a monastically bare cell in a Catholic detox center run by the Brothers of the Most Holy Blood. There is a bed, a small night table beside it, a desk and chair, and a prie-dieu. On the wall above the bed, a crucifix, flanked by pictures of the Sacred Heart and Mater Dolorosa.
The Cardinal and a Brother of the Most Holy Blood are discovered as the lights come up. The Cardinal in a state of nerves; the Brother stands by the door, attentive but inexpressive, except at rare moments when the Cardinal has said something particularly offensive to conventional piety or pious convention. After any action he has been called to perform, the Brother returns to his post of duty before the door.
THE CARDINAL:
God. For the most part I do without
him. Don’t we all. He leaves us no choice,
having left us, bereft us, at some point
in pre-history—say, at the moment Christ
particularly complained of. Was that before
or after the gall was proffered him? Say what?
Oh, yes, I know, it is your vow to say
nothing at all. The merest sponge for all
my vinegar. And speaking of vinegar … ?
The Brother nods, leaves the room a moment and returns with a bottle of white wine, and a wineglass on a tray. He places this on the night table, fills the glass half-full, and gives it to the Cardinal, who takes a sip and makes a sour face.
THE CARDINAL:
Where do you find this wine? The tears of Christ,
indeed! He would have died before he drank
this piss. But piss is sacred, too, if it
is His, and I consume it reverently.
Having—had you supposed? —whispered the words,
the abracadabra, of consecration.
What priest, what Catholic, does not imagine
every drop as somehow holy? Dregs
of the wedding feast, lees of the Last Supper: this
is my blood—
[sips]
—or soon enough will be.
It is kind of the Abbot to accommodate
my evening need to transubstantiate.
He doubtless sees it as the loosener of
my tongue. Is the recorder on? I know
I’m being bugged, but that’s all one to me.
So long as you employ corkscrews and not
thumbscrews, I will unfold my heresies
with all due pomp, a true heresiarch.
But the Abbot ought to know I’m not
the sort of heretic the Church is prone
to burn. In matters that concern the Faith
I am as orthodox as any pope.
The Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the fall
of Adam and the fault of Eve,
the fleshy Resurrection of the Dead,
whatever’s set down in the Creed, or been
decreed by any Vicar of the Church—
in all this I have faith. What I believe’s
another thing. Belief’s involuntary;
faith’s an act of will, more powerful
as it demands credence in what we can’t
believe. Were I the Pope, I’d elevate
the Shroud of Turin to an article
of Faith; I would declare the round world flat
and build basilicas on Ararat.
So much for Faith; in morals, as well, I am
ultra-montane. Priestly celibacy?
I agree. No contraception but
by abstinence. No sodomy. You look
askance? Surely we must seal the back door,
if we lock up the front. Carnality will out,
no doubt, even among our holy few,
but all in cloistered silence, stealthily.
AIDS, alas, has made it hard to keep
our sepulchers properly spotless. Even
among you Brothers of the Holy Blood,
I hear, there have been actuarial
anomalies. One abbot dead, another
ailing, or so it’s said. Well, there have been
plagues before, and there’ll be plagues again.
/>
Please don’t suppose I’m being holier
than though and thine. Would I be serving time
in detox if I hadn’t erred as well?
He sits down on the bed and looks to the Brother for a glance of
permission, then pours another glass of wine.
THE CARDINAL:
I do repent me of the woman’s death:
mother of four and pregnant with a fifth;
a Catholic to boot. Had I had doubts
of God’s ambition as a dramatist,
they’d be resolved with this: CARDINAL FLYNN,
INTOXICATED, REAR-ENDS PREGNANT MOM—
They’re always “Moms” in newspapers—a Mom,
what’s more, who was my own parishioner.
It is deplorable, and I deplore it.
Do I, as well, blame God? Who iced the road
and sent her Chevy somersaulting? No.
I doubt that God’s as meddlesome as that.
Newton’s laws of motion did the job
without his intervention. God, if He’s
not dead, is deaf, indifferent, or asleep.
For me, for most of us, God is a sham—
an ancient Poetry: I Am That I Am,
As who is not? I’m what I am, too—a priest,
a whited sepulcher, a drunken beast—
according to the Times-Dispatch and Sun—
a criminal, though yet, with any luck,
the diocese will pay whatever price
the prosecution asks to drop the charge.
It wouldn’t do, would it, to have My Grace
be sent away, however many drinks
I may have had. Archbishops are not put
in jail. I wonder what they will have done
with me. You wouldn’t know? Or wouldn’t say.
Yours is the vow I ought to take—Silence!
But silence never was my forte. My forte
is speech, and I will use it if I must.
I trust the tape recorder is still on?
Then this is what I mean to do, the same
as any minor Mafioso caught
and facing time: I’ll sing. I’ll tell those things
we Cardinals and Archbishops say
among ourselves, the secret wisdom of
the Church, its policies and stratagems,
beginning with the obvious. Just guess.
He pours more wine, savoring the Brother’s baleful looks.
Abortion, naturally. It is the cause
to knit our ever fewer faithful few
by giving them an enemy to fight,
those murderous liberal bitches who refuse
to be a Mom. It is the wolf who herds
the sheep; the shepherd but assists, and sheep
know this. Wolfless, they’ll stray beyond the reach
of hook and crook. Just look at the mess we’re in.
No one attends Mass but the senile poor.
Detroit has simply given up the ghost
and closed its churches as the surest way
to stanch the flow of cash. Even where there
is money, Faith’s extinct—and Brotherhood,
the kind that’s formed by cotes and ghetto walls.
Consider Poland, Northern Ireland,
or my Archdiocese before this age
of wishy-washy tolerance, when we
were wops and micks and spics and krauts and built
the churches that stand empty now. The WASP
majority was our oppressor then,
but now? Who hates us? Whom have we to fear?
Jews served the purpose for a while, and still
one meets the odd parishioner who feels
a pang of loss for Father Coughlin. Glemp,
in Poland, still baits Jews—the five or six
surviving there. But after Auschwitz, how
shall Holy Mother Church pursue that course?
The Jews, in any case, are not our problem:
our problem’s women. Ah-ha! Your eyes agree.
It’s something every cleric understands.
It’s what we mean by harping on the theme
of family values and the sanctity
of life, i.e., a way of bringing up
men to be men, women to be slaves,
and priests to be their overseers. Think
of Italy. For centuries the Church
beneficently engineered the codes
of gender so each Giacomo would have
his Jill, his family fiefdom, and his fill
of sex, or if not quite his fill, his bare
sufficiency, while she, the Mom, kept dumb
or mumbled rosaries. Beyond the pale
of family, the convent and the brothel
took up the overflow of those who balked
at their Madonnament. The benefit
to all men of sufficient strength of mind
should be self-evident; the rest could join
the Church, and practice harsh austerities
expressive of a holy impotence
or else become the system’s managers.
Of course, it’s not just Italy of which
I speak: it’s you and me. It’s Fatherhood
in all the Mother Church’s Fatherlands.
And it’s women who’ve rebelled, thrown off
the yoke of meek subservience becoming
handmaids of the Lord Their Spouse, who would address
the Angel of Annunciation: “No,
I’ve better things to do just now than bear
a child. When I am ready, I’ll tell you.”
Women demand equality, and no one
has been able to gainsay them. They have
the vote, the pill, the freedom of the street.
Now they’d be priests! They do not understand
when they have won their last demand, there’ll be
no Church but just Detroit writ large. For why
should men go on pretending they believe
in all our Bulls, if somehow they don’t stand
to benefit? They will walk out the door.
Not all of them and all at once, of course.
Some unisex parents for a while will rear
mini-families of one or two,
as now the wealthier Protestants do.
What’s to be done? Redraw the line again?
Admit the ladies and admit the Church
was wrong? Declare the Fathers of the Church
this age’s Ptolemys, ruled out-of-date
by schoolmarm Galileos? Rather turn
our churches into mosques! Islam, at least
holds firm in keeping women in their place.
Within her chador, every Moslem Mom’s
a nun, while our nuns change their habits for
a warrior garb of pants and pantyhose.
What we must do, what we have long discussed,
is to relight the Inquisition’s torch
for the instruction and delight of those
who still can be relied on to attend
autos-da-fe. Burn down the clinics of
planned Parenthood. Make foetuscide a crime
punishable, like homicide, by death,
and if the civil power’s craven courts
should balk, if legislation’s voted down
or overthrown, then we must urge our flocks
to act upon their own. One simple, just
expedient would be to institute
homes where reluctant mothers might be brought
to term; initially, for Catholic girls
whose parents can coerce such penitence,
as once defiant daughters might be placed
in convents; then, that precedent secure,
encourage a clandestine brotherhood
to save those fetuses whose mothers may
reject more mild persuasion. Civil crimes
are justified—read any casuist—
when one is acting in a Higher Cause.
Not that such deeds would make states
change their laws:
we would be martyred, made pariahs, sent
to jail—but what a triumph for the rights
of fetuses, and what a way to weed
the Church’s fields of tares. You think I jest:
so did the bishops gathered in St. Louis,
though after formalities, Malone
of Boston and Passaic’s Muggerone
took me aside and asked to know if such
a league of fetal-rights revengers had
been formed, assuring me that when it was,
they could supply recruits. Then Muggerrone
bewailed the evils of the media,
who had exposed his till-then secret charity
in bailing out three youths who’d raped and stabbed
a cyclist in the park. The Bishop swears
he acted only in the interest
of inter-racial harmony, a cause
that also prompted him to champion
St. Athanasius’ Orphanage
for Children Born with AIDS, a charity
that has been universally acclaimed
except by Bishop Muggerone’s bete noire,
the Jersey Star, which claims the charges paid
to the contracting firm of Muggerone
and Sons for laying the foundation of
the orphanage would have sufficed to build
a concrete pyramid upon the site.
It seems the Bishop’s outlays for cement
exceed the county’s. He was furious.
“The media!” he roared—and you could see
his chins all in a tremble—“The media
is killing us. It’s Jews is what it is.
Jews hate Italians and control the news.
If you’re Italian then you’re in the mob.
There is no mob, the mob’s a media myth!”
And all the while he fulminates and rants,
his limousine is waiting in the lot,
his chauffeur sinister as some Ton-ton
Macoute. What is so wonderful about
the Bishop is the man’s unswerving and
unnerving righteousness, his perfect Faith
that his shit and the shit of all his kin
must smell like roses. God, what strength of mind!
Can you suppose that like aggressiveness
would not more suit the present circumstance
than to require this pusillanimity
of me, those mewling statements to the press,
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 42