Sinners Welcome: Poems Page 7

  of brown and rose and pink, sadness

  and shame. His body, remade, is yelled at

  and made to get a haircut, go to school,

  study, to do each day like the rest

  of us crawling through this igloo of hell

  and laugh it up, show pain a good time,

  and read Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.

  This winter, I felt yelled at by the world at large and God in particular. The rhythm of Knott’s final sentence says it all—“to DO each DAY like the REST of us/….”—the first phrase is a stair plod, with an extra stumble step to line’s end, where it becomes a pratfall you take into slithering submission (no REST here)—“CRAWling through this IGloo of HELL.”

  People usually (always?) come to church as to prayer and poetry—through suffering and terror, need and fear—flaming arrows gone thump in the heart. In some Edenic past, our ancestors began to evolve hardwiring that drives us (so I believe) to make a noise beautiful enough to lay on the altar of the Creator/Rain God/Fertility Queen. With both prayer and poetry, we use elegance to exalt, but we also beg and grieve and tremble. We suffer with prayer and poetry alike. Boy, do we suffer.

  The would-be believers who sometimes ask me for help with prayer (still a comic notion) often say it seems hypocritical to turn to God only now during whatever crisis is forcing them toward it—kid with leukemia, say, husband lost in the World Trade Center. But no one I know has ever turned to God any other way. As the adage says, there are no atheists in foxholes (though reason suggests there are probably a couple). Maybe saints turn to God to exalt him, from innate righteousness. The rest of us tend to show up holding out a tin cup. Put the penny of your prayer in this slot and pull the handle—not an unusual approach. The Catholic church I attended in Syracuse, New York (St. Lucy’s), said it best on the banner stretched across its front: SINNERS WELCOME.

  That’s how—nearly fifteen years back—I came to prayer, fleeing what James Laughlin (via Pilgrim’s Progress) used to call the Slough of Despond, and over the years, prayer led me to God, and God led me to church—a journey fueled by some massively freakish coincidences, which proved over the years that any energy I spent seeking God paid off a hundredfold. It’s a time-honored formula: I prayed, and my life got better, exponentially so. Other wise, I’m not anywhere near virtuous enough to bother.

  Okay, I couldn’t stop drinking. I’d tried everything but prayer.

  And somebody suggested to me that I kneel every morning and ask God for help not picking up a cocktail, then kneel at night to say thanks. “But I don’t believe in God,” I said. Again Bill Knott came to mind:

  People who get down

  on their knees to me

  are the answers to my prayers.

  The very idea of prostrating myself brought up the old Marxist saw about religion being the opiate for the masses. God as a dictator forcing me to grovel? I wouldn’t have it. One spiritual adviser at the time was an ex–heroin addict who radiated vigor. Janice had enough street cred for me to say to her, “Fuck that god. Any god who’d want people kneeling and sniveling—”

  Janice cut me off. “You don’t do it for God, you asshole,” she said. She told me to try it like an experiment: Pray for thirty days, and see if I stayed sober and things looked up.

  Franz Wright states my starting point nicely in “Request,” here in its entirety from The Beforelife:

  Please love me

  and I will play for you

  this poem

  upon a guitar I made

  out of cardboard and black threads

  when I was ten years old.

  Love me or else.

  I started kneeling to pray morning and night—spitefully at first, in a bitter pout. The truth is, I still very much fancied the idea that glugging down Jack Daniel’s would stay my turmoil, even though doing so had resulted in my driving into stuff with more molecular density than I. But I had an illiterate baby to whom many vows had been made, and—whatever whiskey’s virtues—it had gotten hard to maintain my initial argument that drinking made me a calmer mom to a colicky infant. Whiskey was killing me, which—in those early days when I was jonesing for a drink—didn’t seem such a bad idea for either my kid or me, given my ugly disposition.

  Ergo, I prayed—not with the misty-eyed glee I’d seen on Song of Bernadette, nor with the butch conviction of Charlton Heston playing Moses in Ten Commandments. I prayed with belligerence, at least once with a middle finger aimed at the light fixture—my own small unloaded bazooka pointed at the Almighty. I said Keep me sober, in the morning. I said, Thanks, at night.

  And though I’d been bouncing on and off the wagon for a few years, unable to give up booze for more than a period of weeks (with and without the help of other human beings), I didn’t pick up a drink. Which seemed—to one who’d studied positivism and philosophy of science in college—a psychological payoff to the dumb process of getting on my knees twice a day to talk to myself. One MIT-trained scientist told me she prayed to her “sober self”—a palatable concept for the agnostic I was.

  Poet Thomas Lux was one ex-drinker I saw a lot in Cambridge back then, since our babies were a year apart in age, and we’d often shove them through malls in their strollers or strap them to our bodies and nose around Louisa Solano’s Grolier Poetry Book Shop.

  Lux’s first collection written without booze, Half-Promised Land, chronicled split worlds of Manichean dark and saving light. Later, in an interview for Ploughshares, I’d asked him how he’d quit drinking. His droll reply? “I drank one day. Then I didn’t drink the next day, and I haven’t had a drink since.” His verses about salvation always came peppered with grotesque or forlorn figures. In “Tarantulas on a Life Buoy,” the speaker vacationing in the tropics finds a bunch of spiders on a swimming-pool float.

  They usually drown—but

  if you want their favor,

  if you believe in justice,

  a reward for not loving

  the death of the ugly

  and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,

  rats) creatures, if

  you believe these things, then

  you would leave a lifebuoy

  or two in your swimming pool at night.

  And in the morning

  you would haul ashore

  the huddled, hairy survivors

  and escort them

  back to the bush, and know

  be assured that at least these saved,

  as individuals would not turn up

  again someday

  in your hat, drawer,

  or the tangled underworld

  of your socks….

  This is old-fashioned secular humanism, kindness as social necessity. We should be nice to the menacing gang of kids on the sub way so they don’t stab us with ice picks at the next stop. But in one poem about his wife’s car colliding with a moose (“Wife Hits Moose”), the poet thanks a “Supreme Intelligence” for his wife’s survival.

  Lux had truck with a Supreme Intelligence? That dismal bastard? The guy who’d once said of himself, grimly, “I’m no Richard Simmons” (referring to television’s chubby cheerleader–cum–exercise sage for the elderly and overweight)?

  One day when Lux was barbequing by a swimming pool for a gaggle of poets (Allen Grossman in a three-piece suit and watch fob comes to mind, God love him), I confessed to him I was mouthing daily prayers trying to maintain what Berryman might have called my baffling odd sobriety. The scene comes back to me with Lux poking at meat splayed on the grill while I swirled my naked son around the swimming pool. Did he actually pray? I couldn’t imagine it—for Lux was a dark sucker.

  Ever taciturn, Lux told me: I say thanks. For what? I wanted to know. Robert Hass’s Praise was a cult favorite at the time. He’d been the teacher in grad school who read Pound and Eliot and Stevens with me one enraptured semester. But Hass’s own ardor for trees and birds and the coast—his penchant for worship—mystified me, because my poetic enterprise entaile
d our collective hurtle towards death (the prospect of my own death seeming specially tragic and unsung). For me, every thing was too much, and nothing was enough.

  My sidewinding nihilism was a predictable stance for a poet at the time. Even Hass’s book was riddled with the disappointments deliverable by beauty or sex or marriage. In the 1980s, most of us could quote his lines: “All the new thinking is about loss./ In this, it resembles all the old thinking.” (A sentence a pal and I used to warp by substituting “drinking” for “thinking”). The epigraph for Praise had a man facing down a huge and ominous monster and saying—from futility and blind fear—“I think I shall praise it.” In a twisted cosmology I’d never articulated to myself back then, Hass’s monster was God.

  Back in Lux’s pool, I honestly couldn’t think of anything to be grateful for. I told Lux something like I was glad I still had all my limbs. That’s what I mean about how my mind didn’t take in reality before I began to practice some regular devotions. I couldn’t register the privilege of holding my blond and ringleted boy, who chortled and bubbled and splashed on my lap.

  It was a clear day, and Lux was standing in his surfer baggies at the barbeque turning sausages and chicken with one of those diabolical looking forks. In the considerable smoke, he looked like a bronzed Satan at the devil’s cauldron he’d write about two decades later.

  Say thanks for the sky, Lux said, say it to the floorboards. This isn’t hard, Mare.

  At some point, I also said to him, What kind of god would permit the Holocaust?

  To which Lux said, You’re not in the Holocaust.

  In other words, what is the Holocaust my business?

  No one ever had an odder guru than Thomas Lux, master of the Eeyore-esque, chronicler of the miseries that plague the working poor, but I started following his advice by mouthing rote thank-you’s to the air, and right off, I discovered something. There was an entire aspect to my life that I had been blind to—the small, good things that came in abundance. A friend had once told me regarding his own faith, “I’ve memorized the bad news.” So it seemed to me that my über-realistic worldview (we die, worms eat us, there is no God), to which I’d clung so desperately for its rationality, was never chosen for its basis in truth, nor for its efficacy in running my life. It was just a focal point around which my own tortured inwardness could twist.

  Back when I was still shod in patent leather Mary Janes, my mother had introduced me to despondency, spouting Nietzsche and Sartre, and she often sketched for my future—anybody’s future—lonely travails across a landscape so perilous no one could traverse it unscarred.

  Having, all my life disdained as nonsense any spiritual or religious practice, I eventually realized that I’d always believed in a magical force for evil. Like Hawthorne’s minister in The Black Veil, I interpreted the world through my own grief or self-absorbed fear. My evocation of Holocaust victims had little to do with either my compassion for said victims or political fervor. It was part of the pinched worry about my own death, my own losses. If I didn’t get a parking space, it was ever hateful Fate that steered the Alfa Romeo into it before me. Such was my realistic worldview.

  Within a year of my talk with Lux, in a time of crisis (the end of my marriage), someone gave me a prayer allegedly from St. Francis of Assisi—one of those rote prayers that cradle Catholics resent having drilled into them, and I started saying it with my five-year-old son every night:

  Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.

  Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

  where there is conflict, pardon;

  where there is doubt, faith;

  where there is despair, hope;

  where there is sadness, joy;

  where there is darkness, light.

  O Divine Master, ask that I not so much seek

  to be consoled as to console;

  to be understood as to understand;

  to be loved as to love.

  For it is in giving that we receive.

  It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

  and it is in dying to self that we are reborn

  to eternal life.

  Even for the blithely godless, these wishes are pretty easy to choke down. I mean, it’s not hard to believe that if you can become an instrument for love and pardon rather than wallowing in self-pity, your life will improve. The only parts of the prayer I initially bridled against were the phrase “O Divine Master” and the last two lines about eternal life, which I thought was horseshit. But the prayer somehow bored into my brain. In general, I was turning to God more. Even at the interview dinner for the teaching job I now hold, when my old friends were gulping manhattans I coveted, I excused myself to the bathroom stall and prayed.

  About a year after that, my son, Dev, told me he wanted to go to church “to see if God’s there”—perhaps the only reason that could have roused my lazy ass from the Sunday Times. Thus we embarked on what I called God-a-rama—a year spent visiting any temple, mosque, church, or zendo a friend would haul us to.

  But our search for a place of worship was entirely to satisfy Dev, not me. Despite my reliance on prayer, I was still cynical about organized religion, and I often read during the services I took him to. I brought no more curiosity than I brought to soccer (a sport I loathed) when he took that up. If anything, the Catholic church a friend had us visit was repugnant to me ideologically speaking. It set my feminist spikes prickling,

  But the church’s carnality, which seemed crude at the outset—people lighting candles and talking to dolls—worked its voodoo on me. The very word incarnation derives from the Latin in carne: in meat. There is a body on the cross in my church. (Which made me think at first that the people worshipped the suffering, till my teenage son told me one day at Mass: “What else would get everybody’s attention but something really grisly? It’s like Pulp Fiction.” In other words, we wouldn’t have it any other way.)

  So through the simple physical motions I followed during Mass (me, following something?), our bodies standing and sitting and kneeling in concert, I often felt my mind grow quiet, and my surface differences from others began to be obliterated. The poet William Matthews once noted that when his sons drew everyone as a stick figure, they evoked Shakespeare’s “poor, bare, forked animal,” which was—spiritually speaking—accurate.

  They were powerless enough to know

  the radical equality of human

  souls, but too coddled to know they knew it.

  They could only draw it, and they blamed

  they limited techniques for the great truth

  that they showed, that we’re made in the image

  of each other and don’t know it.

  The Generations,” Time and Money

  So the exercises during Mass that may rankle a lapsed Catholic as “empty rituals” made me feel like part of a tribe, in a way, and the effect carried over in me even after church.

  Poetry had consoled me in the same way, with Eucharistic qualities that Hass had first pointed out. In memorizing the poems I loved, I “ate” them in a way. I breathed as the poet breathed to recite the words: Someone else’s suffering and passion entered my body to change me, partly by joining me to others in a saving circle.

  Prayer had been one cornerstone of my altar, but only after a lifetime of poetry had propped me up. In language, I’d always found a way out of myself—first to my mother, then to a wider community (the poets I first imagined, then later sometimes got to meet), then to a poetry audience for which I wrote, then to the Lord, who (paradoxically) speaks most powerfully to me through quiet. People will think I’m nuts when I say I prayed about whether to take a job or to end my marriage or to switch my son’s school. I prayed about what to write and wrote a bestseller that dug me out of my single mom’s financial hole.

  Don’t let me brag too much. I also pray to write like Wallace Stevens and don’t. I pray to be five-ten and remain five inches short. Doubt still plagues me. As Zola once noted vis-á-vis his trip bac
k from Lourdes, he saw crutches and wheelchairs thrown out but not artificial legs.

  Milosz is more articulate about it in “Veni Creator”:

  I am only a man: I need visible signs.

  I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.

  Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in