Poetry


Copyright (c) 1996 First Things 63 (May 1996): 16-22.


Jesus Matinees

Half past two Wednesdays Catholic
-a fair number-would rise up
in silence when their special buzzer jolted our Queens
classroom, summons a good
hour before our scheduled parole to their midweek Saint
Teresa's spiritual sparkle, a canny
swap of Byrd's tale of his schlep over the Antarctic or Vasco de Gama's
spice routes for Jesus matinees.
As if aged or made wiser by this in- cantation, they moved off with short
grainy strokes, an etiquette faith
associates with a seasoned squad of pallbearers primed to meet
the threat of church front steep
slippery stairs, death's dance swift bitsy two-step sole
shuffle spilling soft sand-
paper sounds on gathered grievers below, cargo remaining aloft,
upright. "Early dismissal
for religious instruction," they call it. I envied them
their discharge before our
time and think of them now in the wake of abrupt dismissal,
return tomorrow a fool's
gold dream, of my daughter, 24.

Saul Bennett


"Dread Is the Language by Which We Disguise Our Deeds"

by which we pacify with euphemism
our planned transgressions,
boundaries shifting convenience
into correct countries is the language by which we pun on pleasure,
pour into our mouths the here-and-now,
an alphabet of aftertaste sour on our tongues is the two dead children alive
again for the ten seconds it takes to read
in newsprint the absence of their breath a mistake of transposition,
a column of patient charts
switched like typos dread is the language
by which the Downs Syndrome girl,
unnamed but not unwritten,
is not the one aborted
first disguise is the deed that makes the dead
the correction, that stacks together
the specious: the mis-filed, the not-
chosen, the accidentally-left-
for, inconveniently worded, dead.

Marjorie Maddox


Eclipse

You have taken away my names.
Last night the loon was crying for you, one call
after another, a ripple of clearest water
virgin and pure, cut off from the source, a mouth
of tumbled grief.
The wind was looking for you. Searching
the trees, scaling the tall pines and knotted
salt oaks, the Spanish moss whispering, asking
the roots
where you have gone.
And long after midnight,
when what was left of the sun's looking
glass showed its face, it hid its broken reflection
in the clouds, the low long banks of fog,
a scrap
of used paper, old parchment, ashamed to be seen.
How can I come to you, without a syllable
of my own? Only this begging
bowl,
poor battered cup of my heart where once given
to feeling
now emptiness steals, catching at each new
breath which, like the shore
air over these waters, these sands,
slips
and runs away.
A keel taking on water,
sail luffing and spilling the wind,
tiller awash in tide and wave
you have set me adrift
in the night where I float without compass anchor
or star.

Steven Lautermilch