my sanctuary in a drying tank:
as well embroider double A’s on alb,
dalmatic, chasuble, and pallium.
Does Rome believe such sops will satisfy
the public’s appetite for blood? I face
a statutory minimum of ten!
And what is being done? I must put by
my crozier, to preach from my own pulpit,
surrender the archdiocese accounts,
as though I were another Muggerone,
fold my hands and wait for sentencing!
I may not even speak in privacy
with my attorneys, but the legate’s spy
is crouching in the corner taking notes.
You keep me virtually a prisoner:
no telephone, no visitors, no mail
that doesn’t bear the Abbot’s imprimatur.
And then you counsel me to fast and pray!
Well, I’ll be damned if I’ll be put away
as docilely as that. I’ll bleat before
I bleed. You think my case is scandalous?
Wait till the papers get on yours, my boys!
I trust this is a live broadcast, and that
the Abbot’s at his intercom—with whom
else? Let me guess: Monsignor Mallachy;
my Deputy-Archbishop Sneed; and Rome’s
own damage control team, nameless to me.
If I’m not addressing empty air,
and if you’d like to hear the aria
through to the end, I would appreciate
a dollop of some better lubricant.
I wait Your Grace’s pleasure, and my own.
He finishes the last of the wine in the bottle on the tray, then goes to the prie-dieu, kneels, and folds his hands in prayer. The Brother regards him balefully; the Cardinal lowers his eyes. The Brother cocks his head, and presses his hand to his cowl, as though better to listen to earphones. With a look of disgruntlement, he nods and takes the tray with bottle and glass from the room.
Almost as soon as the Brother is out the door, the Cardinal gets the hiccoughs. He goes through various contortions trying to stop hiccoughing, sucking in his gut, holding his breath. He still has the hiccoughs when the Brother returns with a new bottle. The hiccoughs continue for a while even after his first careful sip of wine—each one being indicated by an asterisk within parentheses in the text he speaks: (*).
THE CARDINAL:
Hiccoughs always make me (*) think of Gene
Pacelli, Pius Twelfth, who died of them
and now is offered as a candidate
for sainthood. A saint who can’t stop (*) hiccoughing!
As well a holy arsonist, a saint
with clap, a blessed ex(*)ecutioner.
The present Abbot’s predecessor felt
a special reverence for his (*) witheredness,
I understand, and entertained the hope
of a mir(*)aculous remission. Yes?
It must be either Pius has no pull
with God, or sodomites can’t win (*) his ear.
Imagine if his prayer’d been answered and
instead of (*) what it is, a jail for drunks
in Roman collars, the Abbey here became
the (*) Lourdes of AIDS-infected clergymen.
I see them now, coming to hang ex(*)votos
at Pius’s shrine. The statue’s right hand holds
a model of a concentration camp;
the left, a water glass symbolic of
his (*) sufferings.
In the course of these blasphemies against Pius XII, the Brother has approached the Cardinal to refill his quickly emptying glass. His indignation finally is too much for him, and he slaps the Cardinal across the face, knocking off his glasses. Immediately, remorseful, he is on his knees to retrieve the glasses and return them to the Cardinal, who after his initial shock seems pleased to have made a dent in the Brother’s composure.
THE CARDINAL:
I think I touched a nerve.
And you did, too: I’ve stopped the hiccoughing.
I wonder if you might have saved the Pope,
if you’d been there in 1958?
Now don’t explode again: keep beating me,
I may seize up, or modify my tune
to something maddeningly bland, as: jazz,
and its potential for the liturgy,
or else a homily on nuclear arms
and how the bishops must speak up for peace.
Oh, I have bromides in reserve that could
sedate entire senates and have done so.
It’s one of a bishop’s most important jobs
to demonstrate to those who wield real power
the Church’s ineffectuality
in matters of much consequence. We scold
bad boys if they make noise, but otherwise
we turn our eyes away. What if the Church
were to attack the mafia, instead
of sub-contracting with it, snuggling up
on St. Columbus Day, and saying Mass
at mobsters’ funerals? You know as well
as I, the mafia would attack right back
as ruthlessly as any sovereign state.
Look at the drug lords of Columbia,
where crime and law at last officially
are one, the shotgun wedding of all time.
Do you think those drug lords don’t intend
to decorate their polity with priests?
their haciendas have not only taps
of solid gold, but chapels, too, wherein
the Virgin Mother is particularly
venerated, and with perfect piety.
For in all things relating to the heart
criminals, poets, madmen, and lovers
are more in touch with what they feel than we
whose lives are ruled by prudence. I have been
assured by Muggerone that Domenic,
his Brother, is as staunchly orthodox
as Ratzinger in Rome—the same “Fat Nick”
who holds the strings to half the rackets on
the Jersey docks. A scandal? Not at all.
Or not according to His Eminence,
who takes a high, Dantean view of sin.
As, in the Inferno, lustful lovers
are tumble-dried forever in gusts of flame,
which are the lusts that sucked them down to hell,
so Muggerone insists that every crime
is its own punishment, and prisons are
superfluous, especially for the rich,
whose very riches are more punitive,
in a Dantean sense, than time served in
the cloister of a penitentiary.
A lovely theory, is it not, because
perfectly self-contained: whatever is
is right, even if it’s wrong. Much more than I,
the Bishop’s of a sanguine temperament,
disposed to find in any seeming ill
the silvery linings of Our Savior’s will.
In AIDS he sees a triple blessing: First,
as a plague selective of those most accurst;
and then in that it affords a lingering death,
time for a true repentance to take root,
and for a good confession at the end;
and lastly, he rejoices in its horror,
betokening the horror of lust itself
which violates the temple of the flesh
and now is seen to do so visibly
for the enlightenment of all who might
be tempted to the sin of sodomy.
The bishop is no less inventive in
finding a moral advantage in the plague,
so rampant in his own community,
of drugs. Not only alcohol.
The Cardinal holds out his cup and as the Brother fills it, continues
speaking.
THE CARDINAL:
We all,
who celebrate the m
ass, find comfort in
the wine that is our Savior’s blood. But crack,
as well. In terms of moral theology,
drugs are a bit of a conundrum—Cheers! —
since nowhere in the older Tablets of
the Law are drugs, as such, proscribed. Indeed,
good Catholics imbibed with not a twinge
of guilt in Prohibition days, and what
is alcohol if not a drug? This bottle’s
better, by the by. My compliments
to the cellarer. So, where were we?
Oh, yes: is heroin or ecstasy
or crack essentially more wrong than, say,
a bottle of Chardonnay? Not logically:
it is the use to which it’s put. And that,
among the younger felons of our age
is to release a murderous rage, and rage
is anger heightened exponentially,
and anger is, like lust, a deadly sin,
whose deadliness the plague of AIDS reveals.
This can’t be the official view of AIDS,
of course; it wouldn’t play well in the press.
Sufficient that we interdict the use
of prophylactics; sin and nature can
be counted on to do the rest. The Church
in this is like those foresters who let
a fire sweep unchecked through timberlands,
then, when the ashes cool, move in to sow
the seedlings they have kept in readiness.
The Church’s view is long as His who formed
the rivers, canyons, reefs, and limestone cliffs,
taught bees, by trial and error, to mold their nests
in tidy hexagons, and teaches man,
as patiently, to follow Natural Law.
I’ve read somewhere there are historians
who call the new age dawning on us now
post-History, a pregnant phrase, and one
suggestive of that Thousand Years of Peace
St. John foresaw in his Apocalypse.
If this is so, the Church must reassert
its claim, based on its own long stability,
to be the stabilizer of the new
homeostatic state, the Pax vobiscum
at the end of time. Oh my, this wine
is mellower than the first. I hope I may
interpret it as tender of a more
merciful, accommodating view
toward the disposition of my case.
The laurels of authorship as little tempt
me as the palm of martyrdom, but if
I am thrown to the wolves and made to serve
that statutory minimum, I will
write such a book the Vatican will wish
I’d never sat at her consistories,
had not been privy to the audits of
the Banco Ambrosiano, nor been sent
on secret missions to the President.
Oh, I have tales to tell, and they exist
not only in my mortal memory
but in a still unpolished form in vaults
to which my legal counsel has the key—
in the event of my untimely death
they will be published in their present form,
and I assure you, there’ll be such a storm
as has not rocked the Church’s holy boat
since presses multiplied what Luther wrote
like basketfuls of poisoned loaves and fish.
Such cannot be the Hierarchy’s wish.
These are my terms: I must retain my See,
my freedom and my Cardinality.
As to the means, ask Bishop Muggerone
what judges currently are selling for.
Now, if you please, I’d like to use a phone.
The Cardinal comes to stand directly in front of the Brother, who moves away from the door. The Cardinal tries the door and finds it locked. He stands for a while, resting his forehead against the locked door, defeated—and unaware that the Brother, after receiving another message through his earphones, employs this moment of inattention to introduce poison into the opened bottle of wine.
THE CARDINAL:
I see. It is a kind of miracle
when those who have been blind are made to see.
Attorneys can be bought for half the cost
of the judiciary. Muggerone
would have known that. My aide-memoire
can’t help me now, if it is where I think.
(faces round, smiling)
Well, then, let me drown myself in drink.
The Brother pours a full glass of the poisoned, wine, which the Cardinal
accepts after a moment hesitation. As at his first taste of the earlier
bottle, he makes a sour face.
THE CARDINAL:
Between the first glass and this next, the wine
would seem to have turned sour. Would you agree?
Ah, I forget—you’re sworn to abstinence.
My tongue should have been as wise as yours. And mute.
He tosses back all the wine in the glass and holds it out to be refilled.
The last of the wine is poured in the glass.
THE CARDINAL:
A toast: to my successful autopsy
and to the holy and redeeming blood
of Christ. May it provide the evidence
to hang the lot of you! In youth I prayed
I might become a martyr for the Faith.
God has too long a memory, too cruel
a wit—which makes Him, come to think of it,
a God that I deserve, and vice versa.
He flinches with the first effect of the poison. The Brother helps him to sit on the edge of the bed. He begins, again, to hiccough, and makes a desperate effort to stop.
THE CARDINAL:
Water, damn you! Get me a glass of (*)
The Brother takes the wineglass, goes to the door, unlocks it, leaves the room, and returns with the glass full of water. The Cardinal, who is doubled with cramps, and hiccoughing, closes his eyes, holds his breath, growing red in the face and takes twenty sips of water. To no avail. The hiccoughing persists. The Cardinal smashes the glass on the floor. He pulls himself to his feet by clawing at the Brother’s habit.
THE CARDINAL:
Cure me! You did before, you (*) must again:
I will not die like that damned (*) wop!
The Brother strikes him across the face, knocking off his glasses, but the
blow has no effect against the hiccoughs.
THE CARDINAL:
Again!
The Brother uses all his force. The Cardinal falls back across the bed. His face is bloody. His hiccoughs are gone. He is dead. The Brother kneels at the foot of the bed and makes the sign of the cross.
Curtain
Robert Pinsky (b. 1940)
Shirt1
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
the nearly invisible stitches along the collar
turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
or talking money or politics while one fitted
this armpiece with its overseam to the band
of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
the wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
the treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
at the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
on the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—
the witness in a building across the street
who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
up to the windowsill, then held her out
away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
to enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her a
rms
around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
he stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
and fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—
like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
to control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
by a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
the docker, the navy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
as slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
and she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
and feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
down to the buttons of simulated bone,
the buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
the label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
Billy Collins (b. 1941)
Budapest1
My pen moves along the page
like the snout of a strange animal
shaped like a human arm
and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.
I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,
intent as any forager that has nothing
on its mind but the grubs and insects
that will allow it to live another day.
It wants only to be here tomorrow,
dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt,
nose pressed against the page,
writing a few more dutiful lines
while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest
or some other city where I have never been.
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 43
