The Heart Is Strange (13 page)

‘Behold, thou art taken in thy mischief,

because thou art a bloody man’ with horror

loud down from Heaven did I not then hear,

but sudden’ was received,—appointed even

poor scotographer, far here from Court,

humming over goodnatured Handel’s Te Deum.

I waxed, upon surrender, strenuous

ah almost able service to devise.

I am like your sun, Dear, in a state of shear—

parts of my surface are continually slipping past others,

not You, not You. O I may, even, wave

in crisis like a skew Wolf-Rayet star.

Seas and hills, the high lakes, Superior,

accomplish your blue or emerald donations—

manifest too your soft forbearance, hard

& flint for fierce man hardly to take in.

I take that in. Yes. Just now. I read that.

Hop foot to foot, hurl the white pillows about,

jubilant brothers: He is our overlord,

holding up yet with crimson flags the Sun

whom He’ll embark soon mounting fluent day!

PRIME

Occludes wild dawn. Up thro’ green ragged clouds

one sun is tearing, beset alders sway

weary under swollen sudden drops

and February winds shudder our doors,

Lord, as thou knowest. What fits me today

which work I can? I’ve to poor minimum

pared my commitments; still I’m sure to err

grievous & frequent before Evensong

and both I long toward & abhor that coming

Yet
if
You and I make a majority

(as old Claudel encouraged) what sharp law

can pass this morning?—upon which, I take heart.

Also: ‘The specific gravity of iron

is one and one-half times the size of Switzerland.’

Zany enlivens. People, pipe with pipes:

the least of us is back on contract, even

unto myself succeeding in sunrise

all over again!

                          All customary blessings,

anathemas of the date (post-Lupercal,

and sure The Baby was my valentine),

I’m not Your beaver, here disabled, still

it is an honour, where some have achieved,

to limp behind along, humming, & keen

again upon what blue trumps, hazy, vainless glory.

In Alexandria, O Saint Julian

gouty, chair-borne, displayed then on a camel

thorough the insufferable city, and burned.

In other places, many other holy

bishops, confessors, and martyrs. Thanks be to God.

INTERSTITIAL OFFICE

Bitter upon conviction

(even of the seven women jurors

several wept) I will not kneel just now,

Father. I know I must

but being black & galled for these young men,

sick with their savage Judge

(‘we felt we had no alternative,

since all their evidence was ordered stricken’)—

deep fatigue.

Conducting his own defence: ‘men do pass laws

that usurp God’s power …

I hope you’ll try in your own way to speak peace.

God guide you.’ Grim the prosecutor:

‘He’s trying to weasel his way out of it.’

Draft records here would have gone up in fire.

Peasant ladies & poupies there    went up go up in fire.

Who sat thro’ all three trials tells me the juror in blue

looked inconsolably sad, and hid her eyes,

when one propped up on his table a little hand-lettered sign

WE LOVE YOU.

The judge is called P N.

This is of record. Where slept then Your lightning?

Loafed Your torque.

Well. Help us all! Yes—yes—I kneel.

TERCE

Oh half as fearful for the yawning day

where full the Enemy’s paratus and

I clearly may

wholly from prime time fail, as yet from yesterday

with good heart grateful having gone no more

(under what gentle tempting You knew I bore)

than what occurred astray,

I almost at a loss now genuflect and pray:

Twice, thrice each day five weeks at ‘as we forgive

those who trespass against us’ I have thought

ah his envenomed & most insolent missive

and I have
done
it!—and I damn him still

odd times & unawares catch myself at it:

I’m not a good man, I won’t ever be,

there’s no health in here. You expect too much.

This pseudo-monk is all but at despair.

My blustering & whining &
ill
will

versus His will—Forgive my insolence,

since when I was a fervent child to You

and Father Boniface each 5 a.m.

But this world that was not. Lavender & oval,

lilac, dissolve into one’s saying hurriedly

‘In sex my husband is brutal, beating, dirty, and drunk.’

Has this become Thy will, Thou Reconciler?

I seem to hear Retreat blast thro’ bleared air

back to an unassailable redoubt,

even old Nile-sounds, where ‘tears’ & ‘men’ sound the same

and ‘not to be’ & ‘be complete’ are one.

Ugh. What the
hell
quail I perplexed about?

Christ Jesus. Gethsemane & Calvary

& the Emmaus road, hardly propose

(someone was saying) most of us are lost.

SEXT

High noon has me pitchblack, so in hope out,

slipping thro’ stasis, my heart skeps a beat

actuellement,

reflecting on the subtler menace of decline.

Who mentioned in his middle age ‘Great Death

wars in us living which will have us all’

caused choreographers to tinker maps

pointing a new domestic capital

and put before Self-Preservation ‘1)’.

We do not know, deep now the dire age on,

if it’s so, or mere a nightmare of one dark one,

Mani’s by no means ultimate disciple.

I personally call it: outmoded biology,

of even mutation ignorant,

and in that, that a bare one in 100 is benevolent.

I wish You would clear this up. Moreover, I know

it may extend millennia, or ever, till

you tell somebody to. Meantime: Okay.

Now hear this programme for    my remnant of today.

Corpuscule-Donor, to the dizzy tune

of half a hundred thousand while I blink

losing that horrid same

scarlet amount and reel intact ahead:

so of rare Heart repair my fracturing heart

obedient to disobedience

minutely, wholesale, that come midnight neither

my mortal sin nor thought upon it lose me.

NONES

Problem. I cannot come among Your saints,

it’s not in me—‘Velle’ eh?—I will, and fail.

But I would rather not be lost from You—

if I could hear of a middle ground, I’d opt:

a decent if minute salvation, sort of, on some fringe.

I am afraid, afraid. Brothers, who if

you are afraid are my brothers—veterans of fear—

pray with me now in the hour of our living.

It’s Eleseus’ grave makes the demons tremble,

I forget under what judge he conquered the world,

we’re not alone here. Hearing Mark viii, though,

I’m sure to be ashamed of by. I am ashamed.

Riotous doubt assailed me on the stair,

I paused numb. Not much troubled with doubt,

not used to it. In a twinkling can man be lost?

Deep then in thought, and thought brought no relief.

But praying after, and somewhat after prayer

on no occasion fear had gone away!

I was alone with You again: ‘the iron did swim.’

It has been proved to me again & again

He does
not
want me to be lost. Who does? The other.

But ‘a man’s shaliach is as it were himself’:

I am Your person.

I have done this & that which I should do,

and given, and attended, and been still,

but why I do so I cannot be sure,

I am suspicious of myself. Help me!

I am olding & ignorant, and the work is great,

daylight is long, will ever I be done,

for the work is not for man, but the Lord God.

Now I have prepared with all my might for it

and mine O shrinks a micro-micro-minor

post-ministry, and of Thine own to Thee I have given,

and there is none abiding but woe or Heaven,

teste the pundits. Me I’m grounded for peace.

Flimsy between cloth, what may I attain

who slither in my garments? there’s not enough of me,

Master, for virtue. I’m loose, at a loss.

Lo, where in this whirlpool sheltered in bone,

only less whirlpool bone, envisaging,

a sixtieth of an ounce to every pint,

sugar to blood, or coma or convulsion,

I hit a hundred and twenty notes a second

as many as I may to the glory of confronting—

unstable man, man torn by blast & gale—

Your figure, adamantly frontal.

VESPERS

Vanity! hog-vanity, ape-lust

slimed half my blue day, interspersed

solely almost with conversation feared,

difficult, dear, leaned forward toward & savoured,

survivaling between. I have not done well.

Contempt—if even the man be judged sincere—

verging on horror, top a proper portion,

of the poor man in paracme, greeding still.

That’s nothing, nothing! For his great commands

have reached me here—to love my enemy

as I love me
—which is quite out of the question!

and worse still, to love You
with my whole mind
—

insufferable & creative addition to Deuteronomy 6—

Shift! Shift!

                        Frantic I cast about abroad

for avenues of out: Who really this this?

Can
all
be lost, then? (But some do these things . .

I flinch from some horrible saints half the happy mornings—

so that’s blocked off.) Maybe it’s not God’s voice

only Christ’s only. (But our Lord is our Lord.

No vent there.) If more’s demanded of man than can

ma summon, You’re unjust. Suppose not. See Jewish history,

tormented & redeemed, millennia later

in Freud & Einstein forcing us sorry & free,

Jerusalem Israeli! flames Anne Frank

a beacon to the Gentiles weltering.

With so great power bitter, so marvellous mild even mercy?

It’s not conformable. It must be so,

but I am lost in it, dire Friend. Only I remember

of Solomon’s cherubim ‘their faces were inward.’

And thro’ that veil of blue, & crimson, & linen,

& blue, You brood across forgiveness and

the house fills with a cloud, so that the priests

cannot stand to minister    by reason of the cloud.

COMPLINE

I would at this late hour as little as may be

(in-negligent Father) plead. Not that I’m not attending,

only I kneel here spelled

under a mystery of one midnight

un-numbing now toward sorting in & out

I’ve got to get as little as possible wrong

O like Josiah then I heard with horror

instructions ancient as for the prime time

I am the king’s son who squat down in rags

declared unfit by wise friends to inherit

and nothing of me left but skull & feet

& bloody among their dogs the palms of my hands.

Adorns my crossbar Your high frenzied Son,

mute over catcalls. How to conduct myself?

Does ‘l’affabilité, l’humilité’

drift hither from the Jesuit wilderness,

a programme so ambitious? I am ambitious

but I have always stood content with towers

& traffic quashing thro’ my canyons wild,

gunfire & riot fan thro’ new Detroit.

Lord, long the day done—lapse, & by bootstraps,

oaths & toads, tranquil microseconds,

memory engulphing, odor of bacon burning

again—phantasmagoria prolix—

a rapture, though, of the Kingdom here here now

in the heart of a child—not far, nor hard to come by,

but natural as water falling, cupped

& lapped & slaking the child’s dusty thirst!

If He for me as I feel for my daughter,

being His son, I’ll sweat no more tonight

but happy snore & drowse. I have got it made,

and so have all we of contrition, for

if He loves me He must love everybody

and Origen was right & Hell is empty

or will be at apocatastasis.

Sinners, sin on. We’ll suffer now & later

but not forever, dear friends & brothers! Moreover:

my old Black freshman friend’s mild formula

for the quarter-mile, ‘I run the first 220

as fast as possible, to get out in front.

Then I run the second 220 even faster,

to stay out in front.’ So may I run for You,

less laggard lately, less deluded man

of oxblood expectation

with fiery little resiny aftertastes.

Heard sapphire flutings. The winter will end. I remember You.

The sky was red. My pillow’s cold & blanched.

There are no fair bells in this city. This fireless house

lies down at Your disposal as usual! Amen!

In Memoriam (1914-1953)

I

Took my leave (last) five times before the end

and even past these precautions lost the end.

Oh, I
was
highlone in this corridor

         fifteen feet from his bed

where no other hovered, nurse or staff or friend,

and only the terrible breathing ever took place,

but trembling nearer after some small time

         I came on the tent collapsed

and silence—O unable to say when.

I stopped panicked a nurse, she a doctor

in twenty seconds, he pulled the plasticine,