Christian Art

Saint Paul, who is often painted balding
               and glum, told us, "If there be
                              any virtue, if there be any praise,
                                             think on these things."
Christine who's an idiot and not really
               my friend called "L'Eglise de Jeanne d'Arc"
                                             the "Jeannie Dark Church"
               which is cool actually
                              in its own particular way.
The theme is particular vices: strands
               of beads and heavy brass earrings, skulls,
                              roses wilted in a vase, pomegranates
                                             oozing red juice, a map of the world
               with America a yellow bar surrounded
                              by blue, your reflection
                                             in a mirror because
Saint Paul also wanted all of us dressed
               in the armour of light which Jeanne d'Arc
                              put on in the end and perhaps it protected
               her and perhaps it only hurt.
It has to be enough to make you feverish
               and ill but in a good way, really,
in a way that your cheeks are always flushed
               and nothing ever tastes good enough
                              to eat so you forget how to
                                              swallow and remember only
                              to sing and that's how you generate
                                              your own astonishment
                              at the tangled way life funnels down
                                             to a dark painful source
                                                            of envy and praise.
Well that's that! Somewhere some people
               are singing Gregorian chants a capella
                              in monkish tenor voices and if I
                                             could find anything to envy I'd envy
                              it with anxious deliberation,
                                             I'd praise light so busy and abundant
                              its surplus breeds wonder and
                                             pleasure and over-indulgence
                                                            and ends in a sudden flash of blindness
                                                                           that never goes away

Dynamics

The manuscript illuminating the fall of the rebel angels
reveals that things must cease to be what they are
for the angels are no longer graceful or clean;
they lack wings to lift themselves from hell
which yawns below them: the mouth of a mongrel dog.

The rebel angels asked, "Why should God be always
God? Even Music Television has at least the appearance
of change," and so were damned. If the imagination
is anything it is a prism, and hell is life
without it: A place where things turn into
what they already are: chairs become chairs, music
is always Mozart.

In the miracle of birth what should be one becomes two.
In the tragedy of stasis what should be one becomes
nothing worth saving. If the imagination is a prism,
pain coats it with sticky grime, any light refracted
as gray and unwavering as suffering in hell,

where travel is always at night and by train,
the windows too grimy to reveal to the demons, angels
and bored listless humans whose heads rest against them
the damp rocky landscape. So passengers ransack
their minds for curses they have never been taught.
Passengers have as well no word for dissatisfaction
or even lack; their own names remain for them
as ineffable as even God declared his name,
the language of need a dark angry stain on the flat sky
pressing itself wetly to the train.

Surrender


Futile, gazing at the sand-colored rocks
of some holy city and the loopy signature
of a friend who says she loves you from there.
You need to go look at something large,
the Grand Canyon perhaps. Stand right
next to the edge. Make someone hold onto you if
you're scared. You should be scared.

From the rim of the Grand Canyon there is much
you cannot see. Still you will find
mud and donkey shit all mixed up with
intolerable beauty and the conviction
that we live in a universe more stark, discrete
and varied than five weak senses can know.

Your own body, for instance. You know its odors,
its curves and hollows. But you'll never see
blood cells in your brain clustered in collages
so beautiful they terrify. And sometimes your heart
beats so loud you ask yourself When's this racket
gonna quit? As if another noise, more
persistent still, might not take its place.

After all we are citizens of paradox, as morose
as statues of husky Christians and more perplexed
than a shaft of light making its twisted way
through the streets of Bologna. While
at a lake in China it's morning, everything bathed
in shadow. And always the stars, remote and
non-threatening, make you feel small
but not afraid. You need to feel afraid.

You need to be shocked by something large.
You need to see it and surrender. You need
to make your surrender an act of defiance.
In that peculiar nation of wonder, listen
as something tolls out the hours of the morning:
A distant fugue, scarce and compelling.
From that place love no one. Come home
and love us all.