My Bishop and Other Poems (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Collier, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022657086X ISBN 13: 9780226570860

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2018

Synopsis

Think of a time when you’ve feigned courage to make a friend, feigned forgiveness to keep one, or feigned indifference to simply stay out of it. What does it mean for our intimacies to fail us when we need them most?

The poems of this collection explore such everyday dualities—how the human need for attachment is as much a source of pain as of vitality and how our longing for transcendence often leads to sinister complicities. The title poem tells the conflicted and devastating story of the poet’s friendship with the now-disgraced Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, interweaving fragments of his parents’ funerals, which the Bishop concelebrated, with memories of his childhood spiritual leanings and how they were disrupted by a pedophilic priest the Bishop failed to protect him from.

This meditation on spiritual life, physical death, and betrayal is joined by an array of poised, short lyrics and expansive prose poems exploring how the terror and unpredictability of our era intrudes on our most intimate moments. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, Huey Newton’s trial, Thomas Jefferson’s bees, a piano in the woods, or his own fraught friendship with the disgraced Catholic Bishop, his syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and flawless ear bring the felt—and sometimes frightening—dimensions of the mundane to life. Throughout, this collection pursues a quiet but ferocious need to get to the bottom of things.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Collier is the author of eight collections of poems, including An Individual History, a finalist for the Poet's Prize, and The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland and emeritus director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences. He has received numerous honors, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he was the poet laureate of the State of Maryland from 2001 to 2004. He currently lives in Vermont.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

My Bishop and Other Poems

By Michael Collier

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-57086-0

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Meadow, 
A Wild Tom Turkey, 
Strands of Hair in a Used Book, 
Three, 
Jefferson's Bees, 
Early Summer, 
To a Lemon, 
Len Bias, a Bouquet of Flowers, and Ms. Brooks, 
Emily Dickinson, 
Koi, 
Boom Boom, 
My Bishop, 
Anecdote of the Piano in the Woods, 
Vitalis, 
The Storm, 
My Father as a Maple Tree, 
Last Morning with Steve Orlen, 
Funky Stuff, 
To Isabella Franconati, 
Bronze Foot in a Glass Case, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

MEADOW

Moments that were tender — if I can use that word — now rendered in memory's worn face, have names attached and, less vivid, places that are more frequented than present places. Four decades is not so long ago, when facing an open window, hands braced against the sill (moonlight on her back) and, outside, grass in furrows, or so it seems to me who's never left for long that window or looked much beyond the meadow and yet have continually wondered what she was looking at, having never, as far as I can see, looked back.

A WILD TOM TURKEY

When he's in the yard he's hard to find,
not like when he stands in the stubble
across the road brewing his voice

with deeper and deeper percolations
of what sounds like "I'll fuck anything
in feathers," stopping now and then

to display his fan and perform a wobbly
polka, chest heavy as he breasts forward
but never closing on the hens who stay

in wary steps ahead, conversing only
with themselves, their spindly heads foraging,
measuring the distance that frustrates

his occasional flustering leaps so that
when they reach the street, their scurry
provokes him to fly, as if he's both

bull and matador, charging and turning
in the air but landing in a bounding,
rolling heap, which sends a rafter of them

deep into the grass, where after much silence,
what happens sounds like murder.


STRANDS OF HAIR IN A USED BOOK

One light, the other dark
  lie together

(an asymmetrical parenthesis)
  on page 15 of Green Business,

by John N. Morris (Atheneum,
  1970) — poems

if read too quickly
  might seem out of fashion,

like these strands of hair
  that are the least evidence

of who the readers were,
  young or old, male or female,

alive now or dead, who,
  perhaps, together or alone,

aloud or silently, had read line 12
   ("What to make of these markings")

as they combed fingers
  through their hair, leaving

behind what the poem leaves,
  an almost

invisible presence.


THREE

1. Awl

As the butt fits
the palm, the elbow
the force, its words
and its work, its
look is its use,
the point of the tool —
leather and wood —
sharp tongue
piercing thought,
stopped and stuck,
a chad of light
punched, not torn.

Stylus minus lead,
you lead by threading
the thread, like reason's
reason, turning right
sends you left, a
needle without eye
upright on your
handyman's bench.

2. Flannery O'Connor & Robert Lowell

"The element of ham in me seeks release."
And that's as the eyes of a peacock fan
look back at you even as the peacock
struts away, picking up each long, rebar-
like leg, such high-stepping, majorette behavior
danced out on those pea-gravel walks, such
beauty, such faith in the cruel miracles
of Lourdes with its piles of canes and crutches
and its unforgiving braces with broken straps.
If you never walked again, if your limbs
stayed disfigured, at least you weren't "inert,
gloomy, aimless, vacant, self-locked," like Lowell,
"a fascinated spirit watching the holocaust
of irrationality, apathy tormenting apathy."

3. The Menagerie at Versailles: Haiku from Samuel Johnson's Diary

The rhinoceros:
skin folds like loose cloth doubled,
big as four oxen.

Camel or dromedary,
both with two bunches,
others with one bunch.

Aviary very large,
the net, black thin wire,
airy and empty.

Cygnets, all tame but restless,
black feet on dark ground.
Halcyons or gulls?

Black stag of China, small.
Lions very tame,
tigers very tame.

The rhinoceros:
yellow horn broken.
The brown bear put out his paws.


JEFFERSON'S BEES

They can cause you a lot of trouble and much pain,
these exotics known by natives as the white man's flies,
but you wouldn't think of it as sorrow or grief,
all that joyful industry they seem to generate,
everyone doing a job, everyone, as my mother
used to say, "at their rank and station." She who had
the orders of angels in mind, she who called
Brazil nuts nigger toes — not all the time, though once
was enough to pass that thinking on to me.

* * *

From his reading he noted Laplanders prepare pine bark
as a substitute for sugar and wondered how far north
bees might live, what routes of migration the harbingers
could survive ahead of the settlements.
No mention of the native Bombus, yellow-banded,
scallop-winged, and veined like beveled glass, not heliotropic
like the Apis but up and out at dawn, working
to the edge of night, grappling and hugging the stamens —
the flowers sometimes buckling from their weight.

* * *

If then we can take from our Bees, a considerable
quantity of their superfluous Honey and Wax
without injuring them; if they will work for us
another, and many other Years, and every Year
pay us fair and reasonable Contributions; why
should we treat them with unnecessary Cruelty
and hurt Ourselves by a Greediness, that will turn
to our Prejudice? No true lover of Bees ever lighted
the fatal Match, that was to destroy his little Innocents.

If you guard them from Accidents, and save them from Poverty,
they will continue, by Succession, to the End of the World.
So it is written in "COLLATERAL BEE-BOXES: Or, a New,
Easy, and Advantageous Method of Managing Bees," 1757,
which Edmund Bacon, his overseer, who kept a stand
of more than forty hives, employed, although no records
detailing the perilous, sweet, invasive harvests survive.
Only a sketch shows the boxes near the outhouses,
north and south, adjacent the poultry yards.

* * *

Two centuries later, they stand east of the house, below
the Loop, almost out of sight, four hives in an enclosure
and two or three more off to the side, less protected,
a little beyond the greenhouses, facing as they should sunrise,
and, like everything at Monticello, restored to an idea
that has not survived its own foreclosures, having been based,
at least in the management of bees, on fostering spring swarms
while suppressing those in late summer, when the blossoming
is over and the workers vie for space with their honey.


EARLY SUMMER

    When I put my nose into an open hollyhock or rose
  and brush the stamen with the fine hair
that grows along it

    and close my eyes to see better what I'm smelling
  and filter the pollen through my nostrils
and rub my upper lip beneath the pistils

    and inhale the scent's velour of color,
  how am I not that collector of essence
who goes from flower to flower,

    freighting herself with what she's made to gather,
  finding it the way I do by scent and sun
but also by the little dance I've learned,

    the waggle of delight my body makes
  by clock and compass, that sends me out
into the coming-into-focus garden —

    its looming, cavernous attractions,
  those blowsy feed bags of silk and plush and velvet
I linger in and do not flit.


TO A LEMON

Hanging from the branches of a neighbor's tree,
you were a vestige of an orchard
where bees returned each spring,
as if the orchard's rows of whitewashed trunks
remained, despite the grids and cul-de-sacs of streets,
a greenish, yellow, knobby goiter,
wrinkled like a forehead and nipple tipped,
waiting to be picked:

mouth on the rind, teeth in the pith,
tongue spritzed by the tart jet
of your tear-shaped cells; zest
on the lips and the wild parrot yellow
of your jacket, pinned with its dark-green stem,
thorn sharp, spit out with pulp and seeds.


LEN BIAS, A BOUQUET OF FLOWERS, AND MS. BROOKS

He arrives in the middle of her reading. She
has to stop and, taking the flowers he's brought, kisses
the beautiful young man whose yellow socks are her
dowdy sweater's antithesis. What's said between them is killed
by applause, but not his smile, which is the smile of a boy
standing in the silence he's created, and
not her magnified stare, which says she
understands why he's arrived late, is
already leaving, and that he is sorry.


EMILY DICKINSON

  ... the Horses' Heads
  were toward Eternity

What would she make of the belted cows
that crowd inches from the electrified fence
keeping them from wandering into West Street
and whose heads are the size of junked snowmobiles
they share the pasture with and, if you imagine
ears as handlebars, even a little shaped
like them — their nostrils snorting
the white-blue exhaust of gasoline?

As they wrap their tongues around grass
and weeds along the road, swallowing
whole the braided, green hanks a hand
can't rip, you see how their steady rumination
and the slow two-man reciprocating saw
of mandibles appears eternal, but it's not.
Eternity is the great, deep nothing, the warm,
watery blankness in their eyes that you see
when they lift their heads, not to look at you
but to make easier their endless need to swallow.


KOI

    Following a path that followed the sloping
  contour of the land, through a break in a wall
that seemed built only to hold espaliered vines
    and trees, trunks corkscrewed
near the ground but straightening
  as they rose, their branches handcuffed,

    and then beyond a second wall,
  a third terrace, we found it where the strangers
said we would, larger than a backyard swimming pool
    but shallower, filled with murk,
a clotted, darkly shaded surface beneath which moved
  tubular leviathans, yes, leviathans, bow-headed —

    orange, gold, red and black, white-flecked —
  nudging toward us like a crowd of souls.
No one was there to say how much
    of the pellets to sow, only
a neatly printed sign: KOI FOOD
  with an unnecessary arrow aimed at

    a plastic bucket with a clear top, hard to unsnap,
  that made a starting pistol's crack
and sent the koi in a counterclockwise churn.
    But it was not until we cast handfuls
in careless, strafing arcs that they thrashed and roiled,
  tails and fins breaching water, white and turbid,

    a ferocity that ceased as quickly as it began,
  and though we cast out more,
they turned away: lumbering, disinterested, unschooled,
    moving fluidly, impossibly avoiding contact. And so
they came to rest not without motion
  but anchored like a fleet.

BOOM BOOM

I leave my backyard and enter the alley in search of my poetry. I get lost a few houses down near the Eldridges' because all the fences and trash cans are identical. I am alone filling a shirt pocket with the bees David Hills eviscerates by pulling out their stingers and that he has lined up on a flap torn from a cardboard box that's pinned to the ground with four small stones. In a toolbox I have a small hammer and screwdrivers for taking things apart. Above me is the sky that is always blue. (This means at night the stars are what I see but can't count.) The alley is dirt. My shoes scuff its uneven surface. Suddenly a door opens, a dog barks, it is Boom Boom, a Chihuahua, not even a dog in my mind. It rushes its side of the fence and is so much louder and fiercer than it needs to be. After a while it stops. Now it sounds like a tambourine because of a collar with tiny bells. Passionflowers grow in a thick vine over Boom Boom's fence. I have been told the leaves of these flowers are the lances that pierced Jesus's chest and broke his legs. Boom Boom is whimpering, lying down near a place in the fence through which I squeeze my hand to touch his nose. "Boom Boom," I say, very quietly, "I love you. You are the only one who understands me." Afterwards, I feel very small and very large, restrained and freed, and certain there is a purpose to life beyond the one I've been given.

MY BISHOP

The summer of high school graduation I felt God was calling me to the priesthood.

What I mean by "calling" is not that he spoke to me in a language I understood but that he had given me access to immense and ecstatic experiences of love and joy, not real experiences but ones I perceived as if a limitless future was inside me, as if, and this is why it seemed like a "calling," I

was being invited to see the world that lay behind and beyond the one we are born into.

I began to kneel in my bedroom and pray, not prayers I had been taught but rather ones that inhabited me and for which I was their instrument.

Sometimes as I prayed the sun would come down out of the sky and compress into a flower.

Sometimes people I did not know materialized in the room and prayed with me, and how glad and comforted I was by that intimacy.

Sometimes the prayers were like violent caresses and I would masturbate.

I was eighteen and wanting to live a life filled with meaning, I wrote one of my Jesuit High School teachers about entering the Order.

What he told me was that I should listen not to the voice coming from inside me or the voice from the world beyond but I should listen to the voice coming from the physical world.

He said, God is immanent, everywhere, open, and available.

Bishop, my first thought when I saw you enter the funeral home chapel for my father's Rosary was that you peroxide your hair and then as you came nearer how little changed by time your face seemed, except for a single bangle of a double chin, but no age lines, no grotesque enlargement of

ears and nose, just a smooth, worriless, mild, unreadable, Irish countenance and that gingery hair, incongruous in a man so plain.

A fondness for you stirred in me not as a kind of pity for what you'd become but for what I realized you'd always been: a short, insecure man with a compassionate heart, proficient at following directions but lacking the common touch — and whose timidity was now a form of cowardice?

What a beautiful detail, what a fine recollection to nudge me with in front of my father's coffin — that you watched the Smothers Brothers for the first time when my parents invited you for a Sunday dinner.

Was remembering that show a way of getting a conversation going after forty years, a quick nod to something we'd shared and then on to the real subject?

And what would that have been, the real subject?

What I remember is that you let my father celebrate alone the sacrament of cocktail hour, the way he did most nights: on the counter a bar towel folded just so on which to rest a long, small stirring spoon, its handle topped with a ceramic cherry.

Drink in hand, paper coaster at the ready, he'd watch the news, while from the hallway a gilt-framed, papal marriage blessing with its holy-card cameo of Pius XII admonished him.

In our house nothing was done without the Pope looking on, like the time semi–in flagrante on the living-room floor with a girl I looked up and there he was, Papa, in his white zucchetto.

For your episcopal motto you chose "To Build Up the Body of Christ," apt for the once young, friendly priest and team chaplain who lifted weights at the Universal Gym next to the K-Mart on West Indian School Road, who never stopped reminding us to play fair, who even in his cassock

could dribble, fake, and set a shot, or spiral a football, and whose wry, almost cheerful expression met us in the sacristy when, as Knights of the Altar, we'd flip on the white row of switches that lighted up the church, flooding the dark processionary of the nave, reflecting off the

cold floor of polished stone like the bottom of a stream, a fine relief of gray blue, gravel and pebbles — the light all at once expelling the shadows, the vacant spaces that left me calm, certain of purpose, as I filled cruets with wine and water, slipping the folded, starched

purificator between the crystal vessels on their glass tray, while you vested, whispering in Latin: "Gird me, O Lord, with the cincture of purity, and quench in my heart the fire of concupiscence, that the virtue of continence and chastity may abide in me."

So many snippets of prayers, spells of liturgy, Latin and English, parables and miracles — the coal we lit to burn the incense; the clang of the chain against the thurible; bowing, genuflecting, crossing ourselves — all of it abides in me still, serene now, vivid in the radiance of my disbelief.

And while the fire in your heart had been quenched, it was not so for the other assistant pastor, Robert B. Gluch, who had charge of the Knights.

Twenty-eight of us in cassocks and surplices, hands steepled as we stood tiered on the altar steps, Gluch not quite in the center at the back, taller by a head, and wearing an ornate cape with a clasp.

Four of us with closed eyes, six of us smirking, including myself.

McDonogh and Braun eyeless behind the reflected glare on their spectacles.

Gluch beatific, head tilted, a male Mary.

When my mother saw my father laid out in his rented casket, she asked, in her deaf-person's loud sotto voce, "Who did that to Bob?" And then, "He looks awful!"

And yet, Bishop, for you she was all false kindness.

"How did you find us?" she wanted to know, as if your presence was both mystery and miracle, and then through the cloud of her dementia, she asked it again, then again and again.

And so, with my mother perseverating and with the waxworks version of my father behind us, and my wife and children, my sisters, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces, my parents' nona- and octogenarian friends, my dearest childhood friends gathered all around ... you turned from

her, as if she wasn't speaking, to ask if I was "right with the church," and then because "it would please your father," you offered to hear my confession, whenever I was ready.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022657086X
• ISBN 13: 9780226570860
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 91