Sinners Welcome: Poems

by Mary Karr

  in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled.

  Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.

  Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.

  Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

  pawing through the icebox for more grapes.

  Sixteen years and not a bone broken,

  nor single stitch. By his age,

  I was marked more ways, and small.

  He’s a slouching six-foot, three,

  with implausible blue eyes, which settle

  on the pages of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”

  with profound belligerence.

  A girl with a navel ring

  could make his cell phone go buzz,

  or an Afro’ed boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell—

  creatures strange to me as dragons or eels.

  Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel

  arcane as any oracle’s. Rodney claims school

  is harshing my mellow. Case longs to date

  a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman

  willing to do stuff she’ll regret.

  They’ve come to lead my son

  into his broadening spiral.

  Someday soon, the tether

  will snap. I birthed my own mom

  into oblivion. The night my son smashed

  the car fender then rode home

  in the rain-streaked cop car, he asked, Did you

  and Dad screw up so much?

  He’d let me tuck him in,

  my grandmother’s wedding quilt

  from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t

  blame us, I said. You’re your own

  idiot now. At which he grinned.

  The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy

  took it hard. He’d found my son

  awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

  where he’d draped his own coat

  over her shaking shoulders. My fault,

  he’d confessed right off.

  Nice kid, said the cop.

  (for Dev Milburn)

  ORPHANAGE

  Now you’ve joined the mist specters we once

  peered into the night waves

  to make out—the sparks from driftwood fire

  whooshing up the black sky,

  smoke rings, mown grass, Shalimar, a handful

  of earth, turpentine, breath—they are

  your substance now in the glorious,

  every fragrance, afterglow, aura,

  and your face permanent marble as the final

  snapshot willed it.

  And just as a child will cling to the creamiest

  silk slip helpless while it glides

  from the grasp, so I sensed your soul shedding

  your hand, a lost glove

  whose nonexistent heft I in memory keep

  holding though now you are

  beyond us. No headlights will announce

  your arrival—high heels

  waggling on gravel when you aimed

  that finger at the moon,

  saying, I have an earring like that.

  STILL MEMORY

  The dream was so deep

  the bed came unroped from its moorings,

  drifted upstream till it found my old notch

  in the house I grew up in,

  then it locked in place.

  A light in the hall—

  my father in the doorway, not dead

  just home from the graveyard shift

  smelling of crude oil and solvent.

  In the kitchen, Mother rummages through silver

  while the boiled water poured

  in the battered old drip pot

  unleashes coffee’s smoky odor.

  Outside, the mimosa fronds, closed all night,

  open their narrow valleys for dew.

  Around us, the town is just growing animate,

  its pulleys and levers set in motion.

  My house starts to throb in the old hole.

  My twelve-year-old sister steps fast

  because the bathroom tiles

  are cold and we have no heat other

  than what our bodies can carry.

  My parents are not yet born each

  into a small urn of ash.

  My ten-year-old hand reaches

  for a pen to record it all

  as would become long habit.

  MEDITATIO

  In the back’s low hollow sometimes

  a weightless hand guides me, gentle pressure

  so I tack soft as a sailboat. (Go there)

  Soften the space between your eyes (smudge

  of eucalyptus), the third eye

  opens. There’s the wide vermilion sky

  that cradled us before birth,

  and the sun pours its golden sap

  to preserve me like His precious insect.

  AFTERWORD

  FACING ALTARS: POETRY AND PRAYER

  TO CONFESS MY UNLIKELY Catholicism in Poetry—the journal that first published some of the godless twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals—feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO’s Real Sex Extra. I can’t even blame it on my being a cradle Catholic, some brainwashed escapee of the pleated skirt and communion veil who—after a misspent youth and facing an Eleanor Rigby–like dotage—plodded back into the confession booth some rainy Saturday.

  Not victim but volunteer, I converted in 1996 after a lifetime of undiluted agnosticism. Hearing about my baptism, a friend sent me a postcard that read, “Not you on the Pope’s team. Say it ain’t so!” Well, while probably not the late Pope’s favorite Catholic (nor he my favorite Pope), I took the blessing and ate the broken bread. And just as I continue to live in America and vote despite my revulsion for many U.S. policies, I continue to take the sacraments despite my fervent aversion to certain doctrines. Call me a cafeteria Catholic if you like, but to that I’d say, Who isn’t?

  Perversely enough, the request for this essay showed up last winter during one of my lowest spiritual gullies. A blizzard’s dive-bombing winds had kept all the bodegas locked for the second day running (thus depriving New Yorkers of newspapers and orange juice), and I found—in my otherwise bare mailbox—a letter asking me to write about my allegedly deep and abiding faith. That very morning, I’d confessed to my spiritual adviser that while I still believed in God, he had come to seem like Miles Davis, some nasty genius scowling out from under his hat, scornful of my mere being and on the verge of waving me off the stage for the crap job I was doing. The late William Matthews has a great line about Mingus, who “flurried” a musician from the stand by saying, “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel….” I felt doomed to be that diminuendo, an erasure mark that matched the erasure mark I saw in the grayed-out heavens.

  In this state—what Dickinson called “sumptuous destitution”—prayer was a slow spin on a hot spit, but poetry could still draw me out of myself, easing my loneliness as it had since earliest kidhood. Poets were my first priests, and poetry itself my first altar. It was a lot of other firsts, too, of course: first classroom/chatroom/confessional. But it was most crucially the first source of awe for me, partly because of how it could ease my sense of isolation: it was a line thrown from seemingly glorious Others to my drear-minded self.

  From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my chest to light me up. The transformation could extend from me outward. Lifting my face from the page, I often faced my fellow creatures with less dread. Maybe buried in one of them was an ache or tenderness similar to the one I’d just been warmed by. Thus, poetry rarely failed to create for me some semblance of community, even if the poet reaching me was some poor wretch even more abject than myself. Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its comforts were a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for
those more gullible believers in my midst—dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

  In the Texas oil town where I grew up, I was an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others just didn’t seem to bear the burden of. In a milieu where fierceness won fights, I was thin-skinned and hyper-vigilant. I just had more frames per second than other kids.

  Plus, early on, I twigged to the fact that my clan differed from our neighbors. Partly because my atheist/artist mother painted nekked women and guzzled vodka straight out of the bottle, kids weren’t allowed to enter my yard. She was seductive and mercurial and given to deep doldrums and mysterious vanishings, and I sought nothing so much as her favor. Poetry was my first conscious lure. Even as a preschooler, I could recite the works of cummings and A. A. Milne to draw her out of a sulk sometimes.

  In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech—the only prayers said. I remember Mother bringing me Eliot’s poems from the library, and she not only swooned over them, she swooned over my swooning over them, which felt close as she came to swooning over me.

  At age five—no doubt with my older sister’s help—I was memorizing speeches from Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth. By the summer I was twelve, I’d developed a massive crush not only on the local lifeguard, but on J. Alfred Prufrock—a poem I learned in its entirety without comprehending much of. The suffocating alienation it evoked—even though set in bourgeois London long before my birth—resembled my own preadolescent inferno, but ennobled by Eliot’s gorgeous language, exalted by that. Prufrock’s jump-cut world, like mine, was also profane, starting with its seductive invitation to wander the grimy alleys under a cruelly anesthetized Heaven.

  Where the locals saw in me an underfed misfit who wouldn’t need a training bra for a long time, I knew old Prufrock would have fathomed the seventh-grade deeps in me and found me fetching. He wouldn’t presume I was a suck-up if I knew how to spell Dostoevsky. He spoke of headless John the Baptist not with Bible Belt reverence but with irony, going so far as to super impose his own head—going bald no less—on the platter where the saint’s went! And since the hair on girls’ arms could make Prufrock squeevy, he understood how the hairy legs of the life guard both riveted and alarmed me as—all summer—I tried to look up the leg hole of his bathing suit. Prufrock sensed the skull under his own unlined face, the way I did. He was a young guy who felt old. Making J. Alfred’s acquaintance, I learned that I was more than an egghead or a crybaby: I was by-God profound—a huge step up in junior-high self-concept, believe me.

  Even my large-breasted and socially adroit older sister got Eliot—though Lecia warned me off telling kids at school that I read that kind of stuff. I remember sitting on our flowered bed spread reading Eliot to Lecia while she primped for a date. Read it again, the whole thing. She was a fourteen-year-old leaning into the mirror with a Maybelline wand, saying, Goddamn, that’s great….

  Yet against her advice, I auditioned for my junior-high speech contest using “Prufrock,” and the English teacher who headed the drama club sprinted down the auditorium aisle waving her hands before I got through as if I’d brought in a page from Tropic of Cancer to perform in G-string with pasties. (Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” took its place, which, unfortunately, I can also still recite a good hunk of).

  While my oil worker daddy, who never picked up a book in his life, might seem left out of this literary henhouse, in fact, Daddy also marveled at poems I picked for him—Frost mostly, and Kipling and Williams. (Later he’d particularly love the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks and Etheridge Knight). He was himself a black-belt barroom storyteller, master of comic idiom—repository for such poetic phrases as “it’s raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.” His love of language made words his sacraments, too. Poetry was the family’s religion. Beauty bonded us.

  Church language works that way among believers, I would wager—whether prayer or hymn. Uttering the same noises in unison is part of what consolidates a congregation (along with shared rituals like baptisms and weddings, which are mostly words). Like poetry, prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: “true” and “beautiful.” (Only in my deepest prayers does language evaporate, and this wide and wordless silence takes over.)

  But if you’re in a frame of mind gloomy enough to refuse prayer, despite its having worked bona fide miracles for you before, nothing satisfies like a dark poem. Maybe wrestling with gnarly language occupies the loud and simian chatter of a dismayed mind, but for me the relief comes to some extent from a hookup to another creature. The compassion innate in having someone—however remote—verbalize your despair or lend a form to it can salve the jibbering psyche.

  Last winter—my most recent spate of protracted bereavement—my faith got sandblasted away for more than a month. Part of this was due to circumstances. Right after I moved to New York, fortune delivered a triple whammy: my kid off to college, a live-in love ending brutally, then medical maladies kept me laid up for weeks alone. However right and proper each change was, I was left in a bleak and sleepless state—suddenly (it felt sudden, as if a magician’s silk kerchief covered the world in an eye blink) God seemed vaporous as any perfume.

  To kneel and pray in this state is almost physically painful. At best, it’s like talking into a bucket. At worst, you feel like a chump, some heartsick fool still pasting up valentines for a long-gone cad. Bowing my head, I could almost hear my every entreaty whispered back in a snide voice. Maybe a few times I dipped into the darker Psalms or the Book of Job. But more often I let “the terrible sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins shape my desolation.

  I am gall. I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

  Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.

  Bones built in me, flash filled, blood brimmed the curse.

  Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

  The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

  as I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

  I was also reading that bleak scribbler Bill Knott, who’s a great companion for the sipping of gall. He’d aptly captured my spiritual state in “Brighton Rock by Graham Greene,” where he imagined a sequel for Greene’s book: the ill-gotten child whom a criminal sociopath (Pinky Brown) conceived in the body of pitiful Rose Wilson before he died becomes a teenager in a skiffle band called Brighton Rockers, and the whole family’s miserable existence resounds in the grotesque Mass mother Rose sits through.

  Every Sunday now in church Rose slices

  her ring finger off, onto the collection plate;

  once the sextons have gathered enough

  bodily parts from the congregation, enough

  to add up to an entire being, the priest sub

  stitutes that entire being for the one

  on the cross: they bring Him down in the name