Meditation after Christian Wiman

Ecstasy—technically—has nothing

to do with the widesmiling,

handclapping feeling of youth.

Ecstasy, technically, is

(to put it gently)

what ancient Sarah felt

delivering a son,

joy tearing at the seams

of you, blessing that

unravels you,

presses,

stretching the flesh of you,

issuing in laughter

if only because the terror
has not come instead.

Nachtmusik for Robert Lowell

Writing only in preacher-words,

we who are the opposite

of beauty level guns at the

fractured, scattered sky.

The hunt is desperation—

I feel the throaty bile

in my soul. All or nothing

now, broke-leg, broke-jawed,

soon to die for want of

whatever makes for the

champagne life, where whiskey

bright as wine turns

the eyes all liquor-lucent,

full of God. The poet

of my own country spoke of

casting worm and hook

for Christ; let that stand,

and yet I will go hunting heaven,
and the Word will strike me dead.

Alles Erdreich Ist Österreich Untertan

They called him Charles the Hexed (hechizado,

verhexte), Carlos the Ill-jawed, the sickle-

souled, the king born from tired soil.

He looked for all the world like a wax man
melting on a throne, a changeling of poor

fortune, the royal imbecile in Spain.

            Charles the Penumbra, the tremble 

            of that long shadow cast by

            the grasping hand, a sick and

            waning moon in a solar house.

           

            AEIOU come down to this, down

            to the drooping point of his

            witchcraft chin. Worse, Percy,

            than what your pious mind

            conceived—say this for him,

            our curse-marked Charlie, that

            he was Ozymandias in ruined flesh,

            the ragged edge where we learn

            that we have sinned.

Austria is so very small compared

with the hallowed earth, and

Charles ended in the way
that small things do.

Valley Green (Fragments)

Walking out in the storm’s tattoo

I saw in the night

Fitzgibbon, smoking by the

laundromat. The cloud he said

was sick and sweet as

burning sugar on

the altar in the house.

                        Let the city be a harpsichord

                       

                        Toccata and fugue

                        in Philadelphia, where

                        I went on like a left-eyed

                        stranger with a sidelong

                        ticking in the brain—whir

                        and wobble, catch and shudder.

Across the street in the late-emptied church,

look, Schwarzwalder at the pulpit,

speaking of the desert, of Horeb

where they studied God in fire

(A God as yet unbodied

A world not yet domestic)

“Comfort were no comfort

now, so I am come with fire

for the wound.”

Once more to home,

and see, here’s St-Etienne

in seat, book in mouth
(“It tastes so bitter—

very bitter, unless perhaps

it’s sweet”) and the

jackhammer heel playing paradiddle

on the floor.

Here is Tolstoy in his dotage,

pilgrim from the long-toothed

city, the sun-beat city, the

city in the air.

                        With these riot eyes

                       

to dazzle and deceive,

in you, by you, I

will get fire—I

will beget fire till

the soil of my soul runs thin.