City Hall.
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Although the trees were leafless now that spread
their bare branches above the City Hall,
still, they formed a bower as though the boughs
had grown together, woven as tight as a rush
mat. The rain, when it came, would run down
around this canopy and the women who stood beneath it
would remain protected, dry. They stood there now,
Mrs. Kent and Mrs. Hope and Mollie
Britt. Above them the sun followed its usual
track from East to West across the blue
Autumn sky. But from the West, a bank
of dirtied white was surging eastward. A wall
built by giant hands that sought to block
the kiss of light, the heart and life that kiss
produces down among the men and moss.
Which one, the sun’s blazing car or the crushing
wall of vapour, would reach the zenith first
and push the other back across its arch
and past the horizon that it broke from? The spinning disc
of light engaged that wall of darkness, each
upon the other set to struggle in a rasp
of clashing flags.
“His brother’s come and stayed,”
thought Mrs. Kent. ‘Though small, he has
a family once again. He’s paid
enough with solitude to pass
the gate of pain and stand among
men. We human beings are trees
and all the poisons, sorrow-sung,
we turn to sweetness when we breathe.
Companionship’s important, then,
and that he has despite it all.
But he’s a tree that does not bend
and others note the climbing bole.
The rest of us are bowed by wind
and wind is how we know the sky
but he is mounting limb by limb
and in his crown an eagle cries.
He’s pushing up through air and clouds
past stars and rushing stellar storms
to give that bird, his soul, a proud
advantage when he finally soars.
Among the lot of us that know the
bowing wind, the tangled stand
that crowd around his stately bole,
are some whose marriage to the land’s
so hard and harsh they never lift
their crowns to seek the sun much less
the stars, who only know the rift
between their stumbled growth and grace
and hate the ones who’ve found inside
the true direction of their salt.
Their hearts defeat them, leave them wide
of water, make a spirit’s fault
and stone that slides on stone will twist
and twisting saps the inner spring
and makes of growth a sandy grist
where bells clack instead of ring.
What’s left is tinder, powder-dry,
and packed around the sturdy trunks
of trees that yearn to reach the sky
like sins around a handsome monk.
So if the air should bleach and chafe
and draw from earth and heaven both
a savior calm that forms a nave
and drapes it with an angry cloth
the slightest wind would sunder space
and in the vacancy a flame
erupt and roar like lions, race
among the brush and speak its name.
The tree that only knew its urge
to grow, to rise, shall flash and burn,
a torch of virtue, fire singe
among its outspread branches, turn
its sweet and mighty flesh to ash.
That wind shall toss across the sea,
its end the striking three-fold lash
of what you ought not try to be.
These wake the sleeper from his dream:
The earth should always figure in.
The great should never trust the mean.
A tree needs space to stretch its limbs.
“Good Grief, but how I go!
An aging lady teacher, me.
Being such I claim to know
a plan the angels cannot see?
Learning doesn’t always bring
a greater wisdom in its train.
I know my books but cannot sing
the Sybil’s song or figure rain.
The boy’s a boy, a gentle soul,
whose speech has fled the vulgar world?
But who’s to play what winged role?
This plan and flag of God remains unfurled.
Perhaps his painting is that flag
but who can read its semaphore?
It’s not our minds but hearts that lag.
We wait and wait and wait some more.”
“There is something awry where the streets come together
where Lathrop’s peculiar spirit’s ashiver
like sails mis-sewn tear apart at the seams
so the world of heaven has broken its tether.
The things that are seen hereabouts is like dreaming.
Why, Margaret O’Day heard a terrible screaming
and Lucy Rosales the Indian girl
said one night she passed by that old place was just teeming
with wandering figures and phantoms that curled
from holes in the ground like miraculous smoke
and then took them a shape so’s to wander the world.
The father left off where his body was broken
by spirit and there where the door was left open
the son undertook to complete what began
when the angel inside heard the Word that was spoken.
The Way of the World is just as God planned it,”
said dear Mrs. Hope as she sensed the whole planet
remarkably still as though taking a breath.
“If we spark to a flame comes a wind up to fan it.
From simple ideas infernos are bred and
they cover the world with fiery netting
so everything’s everything, Praised Be His Name,
and we end getting paid by the things we’re in debt to.
The World is wild. I know man can’t tame it.
Our soul is more grand than the body that frames it.
For most of us patience and labor is how we
will open those gates up if Heaven allow it.
But those who have eyes let them see, let them see,
let the mountain grow wheat if the fields lie fallow.
But beware of the lightning-it has its own reasons,
it has its own logic and rules, and its seasons
are riddles for speech and the priests who untied
from the Rock of the Book and are brave in their freedom.
But we at our best are just torches that lie on
our sides in a box and if fire should fly from
the sky we will burst into blind blinding flame
that’s as empty of will and as deadly as poison.
So careful you vessel, your sails are aiming
you out into water you cannot rename;
your body the boat and the sail your soul,
but the wind is the God you can’t hope to remain in.
Then where shall the cargo end up that you’re holding,
your hull full of holes and the soul-sail folding?
Your gold shalI be scattered the breadth of the waves
and your silks, underneath, full of seawater, moulding.
Let others surpass you, let others be braver,
let those who are carrying less become saviors
and you be a farmer, your treasure be seed,
and transform into gardens the saddest of graveyards.
In other words, quit making seen quite so easy
by the everyday man who is made quite uneasy
by tremulous streetlights and skittering leaves
the Voice that is wind that is blowing us dreamward.”
“Well I,” thought Mollie Britt, “have no idea
what the Plan that God ordained imports,
if God it is ordains a thing, not me.
If in some heaven’s hall, some marble court
above the clouds, some ancient power sits
and claps his hands and sighs and then exhorts
a host of angels quick to plague with fits
a starry sky, the world’s sea, a man,
their seven signal fires being lit,
should I then, being mortal, understand
that extrahuman coda of the clouds
whose comprehension’s bested at her hand?
Perhaps it’s we ourselves, our voices loud
with gypsum, burning paper, wool and lamps,
who govern fate from high inside our towers.
I, however, found a trace of sense
in every act that gods were absent from
that I could not assign to will or chance.
So when I threw a bridge across that chasm,
walking from myself to wordless urge,
I solved that strange equation with my tongue.
When blood begins to marry stars and surge
and some cry God and others cry, Oh me!
I dumbly rise and listen to the dirge.
Our fate is made akin to growing trees
and God is incomplete to tell the tale
and wills a spit of land that splits the sea.
Seek inside your seed to find that Grail,
circled silver joined describes itself.
We bloom to what is writ behind the veil.
So yes, it’s we who ring the heavy bell
but only to the rhythm in our flesh,
and ring we shall and ring be good or ill.
So what shall pass, shall pass our wish or dread
and Nicholas with whom I freed myself
from freedom shall at last undress.
The grace we do ourselves should be our creed
and love’s a feather held aloft by breath
expelled when we recall a pleasant deed.”
By then the sun had met that bank of clouds
yet neither vanquished, neither sun was out
nor clouds were blasted down. Instead, the sky
was pools and filaments of glowing gold,
mosaic to the pools and streams of clouds
that ran and clotted like a jar of rotten
milk upturned. The day was not decided.
Sky was mixed, the water brindled, Life
was variegated, hot and cold the heart
of man. In infinitude everything
is modeled on the level above it
so that the worm they think so base
is made on Heaven’s pattern, no more holy
nor less so than the breath of archangels.
And yet, and yet-the day is not decided.
*
Between the slips of sun, the setting and
the rising, stands a shack whose walls are closed
around a flower, velvet petals black
as argument, whose tender, sooty
plates are hinged around a dirty light,
the flower’s crown, the lamp whose fitful tongue
casts curses on the faces of the beaten
men who, gathered swarming there like bees
dipping their hairy arms in such a sharp
and rotten sugar, sugar oozing up
through broken heart and poverty, through drink,
through anger, sweat of stupid, frightened beasts
and through the filth, the pusy canker born
from every knife that, thrusting out,
is tricked by bad perspective.
“Now then, lads,“ said Campbell pouring
out a drink of whisky into a cup of blue
enameled tin on the stained table they sat
and stood around, on which the lamp was hissing.
“Now then, all of us have something on
our minds. It’s good of Fricke, first of all,
to let us use his place in such a way
and Hopper here to furnish us with drink
that we, in similar wise to this lamp,
may act as wick and with our flame may toss
out light to let the fold of Jacksonville
see the true nature of things.”
“Jesus,
Campbell,” Snow protested, “that’s enough
of cheap philosophy. We have got
a score to settle. That’s the simple fact.”
“Shit. You have got a cripple brain,”
responded Campbell. “Yeah, we all got scores.
I never said we didn’t. Still, I’d like
to see you use a little brain. We chased
the Chinks right out of town, eh? And why?
Because those devils, evil to their core,
were robbing us and stinking up our town.
We got no niggers neither but that old
coon Washington and his bitch and those
two miner brothers up the Applegate and Winston
who does work with horses sometimes for Helms and others.
We rode the Injuns out. But we still got
cancer rotting at our center, inside
of which the still-remaining stink can grow.
I’m talking of, of course, the Lathrops
and that group of degenerates that move around them.
Jews, those few niggers left, and Masons,
sure, that retard whose affliction is
a sign that he is cursed by God, a sickness.
What a perfect piece of evil rot and Satan
worshippers to boot. Yeah, we got a score
to settle, sure, but use your brains-on top
of this we have a role. This town is falling
in. All the jobs have drained away,
all the fruit is grown in Medford, the rail
stops there too. We were sold down the river
by big East Coast-type money changers and Jews
and niggers and all the people that love them
and here in Jacksonville that’s Lathrop, papists,
devil-worshippers, using the Jew and the nigger
as their army. We built this country, this town is ours
and it is us that will retrieve it. We will burn
this rot out and have our fun as well.”
“Well, I got friends in Klamath Falls, good
friends, in contact with a guy back East…”
“Fricke,” interrupted Campbell, “we
do not need any help at this, not now,
though afterwards some contact could perhaps
prove beneficial. But that,” he said to the rest
of the group, “is the kind of thinking,” indicating Fricke,
“gives an enterprise the cast of greatness.”
“Listen, Campbell, I don’t give a damn
about no Chinks or Jews. I want to see
the upstart city boy all broken up
and spread across the street, his idiot brother
with him and that cow of a Dane all butchered up.”
“Cow of a Dane, eh, son of a bitch!”
Fricke bolted up from his chair, Hopper
out of his.
“Now Fricke, Hopper!” shouted
Campbell, arms out stretched to hold them back,
“we have a job to do. Fighting should
be kept for others. Hopper, keep your mouth
and Fricke, swallow it. Hopper got beat by the Dane,
try to understand.”
They sat back down.
“Come on, come on already Campbell, what’s
the plan?” asked Barclay. “Why are we here, exactly?”
“Down to business,” Campbell smiled. “That’s
the way to be. I like it. Listen up
and hear my plan. Our road’s a long one, sure,
and many things have to be done.
But here and now is one thing we can do…”
Campbell grinned, his aspect like a man
who’d just pulled himself out of a filthy pond,
his hair in thick and plastered ropes, his accidental
beard all rough and tangled up and flecked,
his cheeks an unnatural red to matched his bloodshot
eyes, eyes that when they looked around and considered
those broken-down men, understood what made them.
“That idiot monster, the youngest Lathrop,
named Nicholas, he, who in his father’s
savage, boozy shed continues the perverted
activities, true heir of his father…”
“I saw
that place. An altar to the devil,” shouted
Hopper.
“Right! Now there, last night, this Lathrop
tumbled over such a lamp as this
and almost set the place on fire. Were
the place to truly bum there’d be no one the wiser
and we would cull a rotten apple off
the branch and have some sweet revenge as well.”
The assembled group mumbled to themselves in assent.
Fricke laughed his squeaking idiot’s laugh
and Cecil Wendt said thickly, “I want to see
the burning.”
Beyond the flower’s crown, out
on one of the dark velvet petals sat
Bill Barclay, quiet in his dark,
dark beard. He heard himself exhale.
His breath was all he heard, the rest was silence.
Far away, the flower’s crown was blazing.
Campbell sat inside it. His teeth were shining
He poured a round of drinks in blue and red
enameled cups. He heard the sickly sound
of liquid-slop and burble-pouring.
Above the Stage Road in a dark ravine,
the little shack glowed with a cobweb of unnatural
light. The stars spun deep and slowly
overhead.
*
Rectory.
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“Few enough are painters,
fewer still the sainted souls who, selfless,
bend to task with pure intent, to help us,
deep in life, where Spirit’s fainter.
Their work is not for self,
not the name and not the dust they glory.
They glory in the breaking cast, the story
buried by the hours’ snow.”
Father Blanchet thought these thoughts while walking
slowly through the mottled day. He walked
the couple blocks between the church and the house
where Nicholas Lathrop lived with his brother Jack,
where old George Lathrop, erstwhile friend,
lived before the snow of wings exploded
in his heart. An older man, the priest
was strong and sturdy still, a tough, round
face and hair of mostly gray, he held
a Bible, wore a cassock, black with white
collar over simple suit of black,
his only flash the jaunty hat of straw
he wore while gardening. This day, however,
bareheaded underneath a sky of struggle.
Father Blanchet’s brow was like a workman’s
back who set himself the task of lifting
up a heavy tie. This painting.
He appraised
the shed as he passed he strode up the walk and knocked
at the door of the house. Jack opened it.
“Father,” he said by way of greeting.
“Jack. It’s good
to see you. Please forgive the time that’s passed
between your visit earlier this summer and mine
now. The business of the church has nigh
consumed the total of my time.”
“Nothing
there to apologize for. Won’t you come in?”
“Gladly.“
Jack led him into the drawing
room. The weak autumn sun slanted
to the floor and diffused a pale light around
the deep room.
“Can I get you something
Father?”
“No, son. Thank you.”
He sat himself
and motioned Jack to do the same beside
him.
“I knew your father, Jack.”
“I’m aware.”
“He was a friend of mine and in this business
friends are rare.”
“I see.”
“Your father was
a splendid man before the drink. When he
was well and happy he was rare in spirit.
Strong and full of love and loyal. Your mother’s
death, well, it hit him hard he loved her so.
He did his work in light of God, with vigor, loved
and honored your mother and you. But even then,
before it seemed to him that God had turned
his face away, to make of him a second
Job, he was a planet. Opposite the bright
and verdant side a darkness always slid.
He struggled hard with something out beyond
the reach of normal men. His art was how
he tried to throw a bridge from his fragile mortal
self to where the utter mystery turned
the stars. This last painting, it was such a dark
reach. Even the geniuses among us, even
the saints, aren’t meant to turn all the handles.
Some doors have angels so bright and devils so dark
that to look on them would compromise the soul.
See here, your father wasn’t mystic really,
just a man with great appetite and as
a man he could not just accept, neither
that mystery nor the wordy explications
of it, divine or scientific. He wanted
It, itself, the mystery made physical, he
wanted to touch it with his hands and if
it turned out to be as real in the world
as he found it in the heart he so distrusted,
to swallow it completely and sate that hunger,
the longing pressed against your father’s soul
like pain against the fragile sleeping
of the ill. When God saw fit to take your mother
up at Nicholas’s issue it struck him hard,
it set him back and increased the pitch of longing
whirring in his soul and that in turn
caused his grip to slip on his art. He said,
each year, less and less of what he meant,
and in that pause of will something so deep
and dark, one of the rooms meant for no man
to enter, opened to him.”
“Forgive me, Father,
but I am well aware of how my father
was. The mystery of his soul is of no
interest to me and as for his transgressions,
it is not for me to forgive him; he is dead.
It is for Nicholas to forgive me, for I left him.”
“I have no doubts but Nicholas, good as he is,
harbors few resentments. He has such a strange
communion with the world. Such a thing
requires love of such amounts as you
or I could scarce imagine. My intent
in coming here is simply this-your brother’s
just a man. But in him are the same
dark mysteries I sensed inside your father.
He seems to be upon the rim of what
he is. Fraught with visions, blessed and cursed
by vision. If he loses his balance he could fall
and falling be consumed and lose that spark,
that particle of self that pins him to the plate
of Life that spins, suspended in the breast
of God. If God has willed that such an end
await him, let it be and praise his name,
but if it all depends from that crystal point
and how it’s placed inside the vision, well,
I want your dear and saintly brother safe.”
“My brother’s neither crazed nor saint-to-be.
He is, as well you say, a man. He’s lived
a life of deprivation, isolation.
Parts of him were born from that and some
were good and others less so. Now he has
a family, me. And though I will not stay
forever, I have made provisions for
his comfort and shall visit him. Thurmond
is my regent in this matter. He is,
my brother Nick, an artist, yes, and surely
that longing you have spoken of is part
and parcel of the danger in an active
soul’s activities. So be it. He is up
to it. He has support. He’s strong. His painting
is the broken earth that vents the steam.”
“I would like to see the painting.”
“It was
the same my father started.”
“I figured so.”
“Nick is out with Thurmond. They’ve gone for groceries.
Perhaps the key is in his room. I’ll check.”
Jack went up the stairs. His fading steps
left Father Blanchet alone with his memories.
The room filled with light, and Lathrop and
his wife were dancing, others, laughing, tipped
their glasses up and he himself was there,
rubbing elbows with he good men and women
who had gathered together to celebrate the baby
grinning in the rattan cot in the far corner.
A happy time. Father Blanchet recalled
remembering a talk with Lathrop earlier that week.
“Father, I am well into a project. A painting.
This is the sum of all I am to date-the
good and bad, the divine and mortal, man
and God, the life we live and that we long for.
I would like you to look at it. I think it resolves some problems
plaguing men’s minds in these dark years.
Perhaps the sincerity and my humble hardworking
way of touching makes it fit for altar.
What I’m saying is-have it as
your altarpiece if it does great enough honor
to our spiritual road.”
That night he took the Father
by the arm and left the bright musical
house behind and led him through the damp
cool grass to the dark shed. He opened
up the shed and led him in and lit
a lamp.
“Truly, George,” the Father crossed
himself, “this thing’s inspired by a further
source than you. That is, your soul has opened
up like souls should. I will consider
mounting this, violent though it is,
behind our altar. Struggle’s in it. Sure,
it will upset and most would have their flocks
as tame as sheep and usually so would I.
However, something in me now awakens.
Something here is better than what we,
perhaps incorrectly, call Peace.”
And here he was
again in Lathrop’s house. Older. Who knows?
And this painting. Continued? Perhaps it’s darker
than he thought at first in youth’s enthusiasm.
Perhaps the thing was not beloved of God at all.
“Father! Found them, hanging on a nail
near his bed.”
He held a small ring of keys.
“I’ll show you.”
He led him through the damp
grass to the dark shed, opened up
the door and lit the lamp. A vibrant jumble,
vigorous in its disarray struck the zinc
tablet at the bottom of the wells of his eyes and burned.
“Ah, son. You say your brother’s not a saint
and men who ages past took pen to parchment,
glory to the Lord, were also of such mind
and yet can spikes of ink pin down the will
of God at four corners? Let us say
at any rate that Life is simple as
a cistern. God has filled the cistern up.
But few are given ladles. Inside his hidden speech
his painting is the ladle, bright brass
that catches up our life, our hidden life,
infuses it with light and tosses it,
full-formed, against the canvas, makes of living
a boat with a glass bottom to ride in. It’s too
familiar and too strange. Surely it
would aggravate the congregation too much
to know it. For such a mortal soul as mine
this speech is so far afield that there might
be some of darker meanings in it. Your father
began this piece long years ago to hang it
in the church. To paint the dictates of the soul.
The soul’s geometry, so complicated, a tyrant;
the first degree of reason. I feel pangs
of conscience pinch me, son. Have I been
too easy in my duty? I took this calling
up to push and pull and guide my brothers
and sisters up the slope of every day
to, on some promontory of the soul,
speak out to God even if that should destroy them.
Instead, I’ve been a social leader, a simple
moral referee. Ah, forgive
my pining and my indulgent introspection.”
He turned his troubled face to go.
“Count on me
for help if ever you need it, Jack. Stop by.
We’ll walk in the rose garden as did your father and I.”
“I will Father. Thank you, Father. For your
concern, your deep concern, my father’s friend.”
Jack watched him go. He held himself erect,
surveyed the dark tin hills stamped
in the air, the liquid gold film between them
and the thickening gray of the afternoon clouds
and disappear up the road, drawing a cold
fog from the ground as he trod upon it. The god-driven
man mounts Sinai, even as
he eats a bowl of soup.
