Tag Archives: Mark Jarman

“1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Irish Coast

How long do we wait for love?
Long ago, we rowed on a pond.
Our oars left the moon broken—
our gestures ruining the surface.
Our parents wanted us to marry.
Beyond the roses where we lay,
men who loved men grew wounds.
When do we start to forget our age?
Your husband and I look the same.
All day, your mother confuses us
as her dementia grows stronger.
Your boys yell: Red Rover!
We whisper your sister’s name
like librarians; at last on the list,
her heart clapping in her rib cage,
having stopped now six times,
the pumps opened by balloons,
we await her new heart cut
out from the chest of a stranger.
Your old house settles in its bones,
pleased by how we are arranged.
Our shadow grows like an obituary.
One of us says: “It is getting so dark.”
Your children end their game.
Trees stiffen into scrapbooks.
The sky’s shelves fill with stars.

__________

“1 Corinthians 13” by Spencer Reece.

I can’t understand Spencer Reece. His CV: Born in Hartford, Connecticut; Master of Theology, Harvard; Master of Divinity, Yale; Missionary to the Nuestras Pequenas Rosas orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Missionary to the homeless and ordained priest of the Episcopal Church in Madrid, Spain; Manager of a Brooks Brothers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It’s that last bit which is, as Gore Vidal would say, the joker in the deck. French cuffs and Windsor knots hardy pair with homeless shelters and Honduran slums. But then again, rarely does religious poetry move with such a frantic, almost manic, energy, so perhaps Reece is capable of registering and giving voice to an usually wide spectrum of human experience. I once wrote, in a stroke of mild hyperbole, that Mark Jarman (a reader of this blog and my favorite living religious poet) wrote like T.S. Eliot in a fever dream. There is certainly something feverish to “1 Corinthians 13” as well, though Reece seems to be less in a reverie and more in a careful though entranced plod through the wilderness of memory.

When I first found it, I was so moved by this poem that I reread it about six times and immediately ordered the containing collection, Reece’s The Road to Emmaus. I think this poem is the strongest in the book, though Emmaus also contains “The Clerk’s Tale”, a poem so intricate and strangely stirring that The New Yorker, in an unprecedented editorial move, devoted a full back page to it. Oh yeah, and, coincidentally, it’s about a guy who works at a men’s clothier at the Mall of America in Minnesota. I suggest you give it a slow and careful read.

By the way, in the 13th chapter of his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says, among other things:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing…

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

I took the above picture in Ireland.

“Unholy Sonnet #9” by Mark Jarman

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Ireland - Barbed Wire

Someone is always praying as the plane
Breaks up, and smoke and cold and darkness blow
Into the cabin. Praying as it happens,
Praying before it happens that it won’t.
Someone was praying that it never happen
Before the first window on Kristallnacht
Broke like a wine glass wrapped in bridal linen.
Before it was imagined, someone was praying
That it be unimaginable. And then,
The bolts blew off and people fell like bombs
Out of their names, out of the living sky.
Surely, someone was praying. And the prayer
Struck the blank face of earth, the ocean’s face,
The rockhard, rippled face of facelessness.

__________

“Unholy Sonnet #9” by Mark Jarman, pulled from his stunning collection Unholy Sonnets.

The picture was taken in New Ulm, Texas. Some other favorites from Jarman, who is not only one of the most profound lyric and narrative poets writing but also an occasional reader of this blog, are below:

Mark Jarman

“History” by Mark Jarman

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Mark Jarman

History is not as porous to God as I thought and the gaps grow farther apart.

We can be like the child whose sister was raped and murdered who said at the funeral, “All the happy times I spent with you and will spend with you, I enjoyed and will enjoy.” Or like the woman who has one memory of her mother who died when she was eight. She is shouting at her in front of a closet.

In the meantime, put in the eyes of wish fulfillment, put out the hand with its five hungers, put on the skin of fiction.

When, with the help of micromachines, I am able to alter my shape at will, indeed to give myself a lifeshape without a death instinct, when I have conquered death in this body or another substitute body, while retaining enough of my soul to enjoy it, will I be worrying you or myself about what God wishes for his children?

This, as they say, lies years in the future. And if we are made or remade from remnants, thawed and brought back, it is years in the future. Burn your body and you will be safe, probably. Or maybe not. We are grave robbers–the museums, the traveling exhibits.

Eternal life may be coming back to this world perfected,
without your permission.

The creation of diamonds. A blip. The crocheting of DNA. A blip. Cross-stitch of the bilateral face. A blip. Condensation of tears from Paleozoic seas. A blip. Endurance of the strange, the doubly strange, the triply strange particle. A blip.

The time it takes to bring you past the kiss, past the coupling, past the nearly dispassionate concentration, so that time can stop. Blip. Blip. Blip. But the nine months, the terrible twos, the childhood, adolescence, adulthood, all the elongation of growing up and its estranging inwardness, the longed for reconciliation of parent and child before death, the wait for rebirth: these take forever.

What are you thinking now about eternal life? That it will be life eternally. And the bloody news at breakfast will continue. And the free-floating anxiety will continue. And the cosmic indifference will continue. But so will nakedness with my wife, black coffee in the morning, being read Dickens by my daughter before bedtime.

What are you thinking now about eternal life? That I will shed my guilt like sodden running clothes and hear the hymn of praise beginning in my throat as the multifoliate radiance anoints my face like a stiff hot shower and blurs every memory of earth.

What are you thinking now about eternal life? That I will wake up, stare at the twilit room, move over to mold my body to Amy’s, my left hand on her right breast, and go back to sleep for half an hour.

When the preacher stood before the class that day in June, 1968, and said that history was a river that God entered at will, he wished to console us for the assassinations. To comfort those who mourned. But no one seemed to understand. Perhaps no one was mourning.

Perhaps he should have said that history was a freeway that God entered at will. Perhaps he should have said that history was a TV show that God interrupted at will. Perhaps he should have said that history was six periods of stone boredom five consecutive days a week and an afterschool job and a weekend of chores that God cancelled at will.

He said history was a river. And the only river we knew was the Los Angeles, a concrete flood channel we had never seen in flood, running alongside the freeway like a giant gutter. And the assassinations that spring had occurred on people’s 16th birthdays.

Behind, beyond, before and after, existing now but separately, accessible in some special instances, like prayer, but present only as a listening, present only as a signal coming from a distance, present only as a silence.

We can live eternally like that. But for the time being, we will live as we are, for as long as we can.

These are the gifts of the Spirit. The belief that the body is enough. The belief that Love is a god. The belief that the next world is this world perfected.

__________

Like T.S. Eliot in a 21st century feverdream: Mark Jarman’s “History” from his collection Epistles: Poems.

This is an absolute tour de force of thought and writing — I suggest reading it in silence. It does everything a poem should do: it covers intellectual and emotional ground, it exercises language and creates pictures; it communicates sharply, stirs up dormant or longsleeping ideas in your mind, and it doesn’t spoonfeed. It echos through repetition of phrases and questions, while leaving other ideas only partially unturned — waiting for you to either read over them (and explore them more and again) or merely move on. It’s what T.S. Eliot would be writing if he were alive today.

The picture is of Jarman outside his office at Vanderbilt University.

Forgive God

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Boston Marathon

2.
First forgive the silence
That answers prayer,
Then forgive the prayer
That stains the silence.

Excuse the absence
That feels like presence,
Then excuse the feeling
That insists on presence.

Pardon the delay
Of revelation,
Then ask pardon for revealing
Your impatience.

Forgive God
For being only a word,
Then ask God to forgive
The betrayal of language.

3.
God of the Syllable
God of the Word
God Who Speaks to Us
God Who Is Dumb

The One God The Many
God the Unnameable
God of the Human Face
God of the Mask

God of the Gene Pool
Microbe Mineral
God of the Sparrow’s Fall
God of the Spark

God of the Act of God
Blameless Jealous
God of Surprises
And Startling Joy

God Who Is Absent
God Who Is Present
God Who Finds Us
In Our Hiding Places

God Whom We Thank
Whom We Forget to Thank
Father God Mother
Inhuman Infant

Cosmic Chthonic
God of the Nucleus
Dead God Living God
Alpha God Zed

God Whom We Name
God Whom We Cannot Name
When We Open Our Mouths
With the Name God Word God

4.
The new day cancels dread
And dawn forgives all sins,
All the judgments of insomnia,
As if they were only dreams.

The ugly confrontation
After midnight, with the mirror,
Turns white around the edges
And burns away like frost.

Daylight undoes gravity
And lightness responds to the light.
The new day lifts all weight,
Like stepping off into space.

Where is that room you woke to,
By clock-light, at 3 a.m.?
Nightmare’s many mansions,
Falling, have taken it with them.

The new day, the day’s newness,
And the wretchedness that, you thought,
Would never, never depart,
Meet—and there is goodbye.

A bad night lies ahead
And a new day beyond that—
A simple sequence, but hard
To remember in the right order.

5.
Lord of dimensions and the dimensionless,
Wave and particle, all and none,

Who lets us measure the wounded atom,
Who lets us doubt all measurement,

When in this world we betray you
Let us be faithful in another.

__________

The final four of Mark Jarman’s “Five Pslams”. Pick up Jarman’s recently published collection Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems.

You all know what the photograph is from. But it’s even more unsettling if you consider what it is showing: exhausted runners charging toward an explosion.

All thoughts and feelings are for those maimed and murdered in Monday’s attack, especially the Richard family, whose son Martin, 8, was killed and whose daughter, 6, lost a leg.

This Time Nothing’s Forbidden

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

London Cherub

God says to Adam and Eve, “This time nothing’s forbidden.
You may have the garden and the fruit of every tree.
That tree’s fruit will give you knowledge of good and evil.
The fruit of this tree, even better, will make you forget.
Eat all you want. Let bygones be bygones.”
And so at once they go to find the wall
And the way out, eating as they go,
Burning as they go, going because just thinking
There is a wall makes them feel cramped. They cross
Rivers and mountains, seas, they find no wall.
They eat the fruit of knowledge and see the problem:
Without a wall, the world is all they have,
Crisscrossed by their progress, a vacant lot.
God reminds them, “Nothing is forbidden.”
They eat the fruit of forgetfulness, and forget.

__________

“Outside” by Mark Jarman, which you’ll find in his collection Questions for Ecclesiastes.

I took the photograph of a lamp post near Piccadilly Circus in London.

“Prayer for Our Daughters” by Mark Jarman

05 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

Mark Jarman

May they never be lonely at parties
Or wait for mail from people they haven’t written
Or still in middle age ask God for favors
Or forbid their children things they were never forbidden.

May hatred be like a habit they never developed
And can’t see the point of, like gambling or heavy drinking.
If they forget themselves, may it be in music
Or the kind of prayer that makes a garden of thinking.

May they enter the coming century
Like swans under a bridge into enchantment
And take with them enough of this century
To assure their grandchildren it really happened.

May they find a place to love, without nostalgia
For some place else that they can never go back to.
And may they find themselves, as we have found them,
Complete at each stage of their lives, each part they add to.

May they be themselves, long after we’ve stopped watching.
May they return from every kind of suffering
(Except the last, which doesn’t bear repeating)
And be themselves again, both blessed and blessing.

__________

“Prayer for Our Daughters” by Mark Jarman. You can find it in Jarman’s collection To the Green Man: Poems.

“If I Were Paul” by Mark Jarman

21 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by in Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Mark Jarman

Consider how you were made.

Consider the loving geometry that sketched your bones, the passionate symmetry that sewed flesh to your skeleton, and the cloudy zenith whence your soul descended in shimmering rivulets across pure granite to pour as a single braided stream into the skull’s cup.

Consider the first time you conceived of justice, engendered mercy, brought parity into being, coaxed liberty like a marten from its den to uncoil its limber spine in a sunny clearing, how you understood the inheritance of first principles, the legacy of noble thought, and built a city like a forest in the forest, and erected temples like thunderheads.

Consider, as if it were penicillin or the speed of light, the discovery of another’s hands, his oval field of vision, her muscular back and hips, his nerve-jarred neck and shoulders, her bleeding gums and dry elbows and knees, his baldness and cauterized skin cancers, her lucid and forgiving gaze, his healing touch, her mind like a prairie.  Consider the first knowledge of otherness. How it felt.

Consider what you were meant to be in the egg, in your parents’ arms, under a sky full of stars.

Now imagine what I have to say when I learn of your enterprising viciousness, the discipline with which one of you turns another into a robot or a parasite or a maniac or a body strapped to a chair. Imagine what I have to say.

Do the impossible. Restore life to those you have killed, wholeness to those you have maimed, goodness to what you have poisoned, trust to those you have betrayed.

Bless each other with the heart and soul, the hand and eye, the head and foot, the lips, tongue, and teeth, the inner ear and the outer ear, the flesh and spirit, the brain and bowels, the blood and lymph, the heel and toe, the muscle and bone, the waist and hips, the chest and shoulders, the whole body, clothed and naked, young and old, aging and growing up.

I send you this not knowing if you will receive it, or if having received it, you will read it, or if having read it, you will know that it contains my blessing.

__________

“If I Were Paul” by Mark Jarman.

Wailing Wall

As more informed readers will know, Jarman is a Christian; and as Christian readers will understand, the title “If I Were Paul” is a reference to a certain Saul of Tarsus.

In this poem, Jarman is Paul the Apostle speaking through the voice of a poet. The words are a poetic distillation of what Paul was trying to say in his letters to the churches of Phillipi, Corinth, and Collosae.

The opening five sentences each begin with the command to “consider,” calling us to reflect on the numinous beauty and fragility of our lives. In this, he is the contemplative conscience of Paul. Jarman then makes the abrupt transition to Paul as a figure of authority — “imagine what I have to say” — and channels all of Paul’s mind into condemning, in a striking phrase, the “enterprising viciousness” of those in the early churches. His call to “do the impossible” is the central command of Christian dogma: live and forgive like Jesus Christ.

The final sentence of the poem is absolutely essential to its message. For in the first century, Paul had no guarantee that his letters, which required considerable time and effort to pen, would actually be delivered to those in the various Mediterranean churches to whom he was writing. So Paul sent them not knowing if they were ever to reach their destination. More still, the limits of words, especially written ones, demand that tone is extremely difficult to convey.

Thus Paul was unsure all the more. He felt what fathers and mothers feel in disciplining their children, the uncertainty of knowing whether one’s lofty standards and strict condemnations will actually be received for what they are: a blessing.Wailing Wall

The pictures were taken at the Western “Wailing” Wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The folded papers are prayers traditionally placed into its cracks.

__________

Update — I sent Jarman a message with a link to this post and he was nice enough to write back:

Dear John,

Thank you for this more than generous and sympathetic reading of my poem, “If I were Paul.” If I were to add anything, it would be that my aim was to sound like a contemporary Paul. Though you rightly, I think, hear the tone of the first century Paul, speaking to the early churches, my hope is that I could talk to a contemporary audience in that tone, and also one that might not be exclusively Christian. My best regards to your aunt, a wonderful painter and person.

Mark Jarman