Work Text:
I
You were one year old,
(And you don't remember it, but)
They sprinkled you with water
In the name of the Father, and the Son,
And the Holy Spirit.
Amen. (The fire
Would come later.)
And though they named you
After he who thrice denied Christ,
Simon Peter was also the rock of the Church,
And St Christopher still protected you
Wherever you went.
You learned the word martyr
When you were seven,
But you didn't understand
What it meant
To die for a love
So strong.
II
At fourteen you started
Getting into fights with the Sisters
About all the questions
They too quickly evaded,
Citing your tender age
As the reason
For your necessary ignorance.
One of them broke your little finger
With her wooden ruler,
So you stopped going to classes.
You spent hours and days
In the library instead,
Wondering whether
The Fruit of the Tree
Of the Knowledge
Of Good and Evil
Was still forbidden,
Or if God had gotten over
That grudge of His yet.
Miracle your father never found out;
It never did heal right.
III
At seventeen you came to know Woman,
(Didn't care much for her, Woman).
You read First Samuel and knew
That Jonathan and King David
Were closer than they first appeared.
It had to be a sin
How the curve of
Jesus' stained-glass hip
(Just visible from the pew
If you leaned back
And pretended you were
Full of the Holy Spirit)
Thrilled you so deeply.
You prayed that God would
Send you an angel,
A holy messenger
In the form of a man—
Bearing what message,
You didn't care—
But God, how you prayed.
Maybe God didn't hear,
Or maybe He did, but heard wrong,
Because your earthly father
Found those magazines under your mattress,
Called you Abomination,
And cast you out.
You prayed for those
Who persecuted you
And blessed those
Who cursed you.
"Holy Mary, Virgin of Virgins,
Archangel Raphael,
St Eugene and St Jude,
St Joseph and St Patrick,
Pray for me:
Forgive my father
For he knows not
What he does.
Amen."
You wrote him every week,
Begging absolution, pleading forgiveness,
Promising you had put away childish things.
He engraved return to sender
In biro on the envelopes.
Like Father, like Son.
You got used to living alone,
Stopped searching for God in church,
Started searching for anything
That would grow
In the barren salted earth
Of your heart.
IV
The years to come seemed waste of breath:
You were twenty-one
When you went to America
Hoping for more
Than the place you crawled out of
On your belly, eating dust.
Éirinn go Brách only got you so far
With those American boys,
Unrefined and unrepentant,
Shaking the mountains with their dance.
America had already seen
Too many dreams like yours,
Too many needs like yours.
When the foolish took their lamps
They took no oil with them,
But the wise took vessels of oil
With their lamps.
V
You set to shaming the saints categorically.
You half prayed to St Vivian,
Whose body even the feral dogs
Wouldn't go near;
Paid for oblivion
In money (when you had it,
Even when you didn't have enough;
Paid in what you learned
From the Song of Songs
When you didn't have the money.
The word of the Lord.)
You pawned St Christopher for twenty quid
And spent it on whatever
Would feel most like
Spitting in your father's face.
On your back, in hotels,
You saw such stars
In the firmament
Of those crumbling plaster ceilings.
It tasted a little like Heaven.
St Sebastian's martyring arrows
Pierced your skin,
Pricked your forearms,
Filled you with the angels' fire,
With dirty holy light.
VI
One night your sacred visions disappeared,
St Sebastian was gone,
You were just alone in a hotel,
And the Heavens were empty.
You never were good at maths,
Or at looking too closely at what you got
And where it came from.
You didn't believe in anything
Quite enough for it to matter much:
A waste of breath the years behind;
In balance with this life, this death.
They said it was an accident.
VII
(And you don't remember it, but)
Your father got a call the next morning
And he went to hospital.
You were stretched out on the table,
Pale as a winter sunset.
Your father said,
"Though He slay me,
Yet will I trust in Him,"
Crossed himself—
Father, Son, Holy Spirit,
Amen— and left. They buried you.
Your mother keened;
The sins of the father
Visited upon the son?
She wondered what on Earth
She had done wrong.
The weight of earth
Crushed all the air in your lungs.
There was no angel
To tell you fear not.
(And you don't remember it, but)
You were hungry,
And they gave you no meat.
You were a stranger,
And they let you not in.
Whoso curseth
His father or mother,
Let his blood be
On his own head:
Thou shalt not kill.
You caught her in a corner;
This do in remembrance of Me.
VIII
However long you were asleep,
It was four days to you.
Like Lazarus.
You woke up, arms outstretched—
Jesus was not there.
You asked, "Where
Am I?"
IX
The voice spoke to you;
It quoted the Revelation
And you told yourself fear not.
X
Your father
Could not look you in your mica-silver eyes—
Coins for eyes,
St Peter's coins,
Judas' coins.
You did not try again,
Did not pray to St Jude again.
XI
The voice spoke to you;
It quoted the Revelation,
Promised incorruptible.
You won your freedom by
The stripes of your own back;
Jesus was not there.
XII
Your father came again,
The day the two men
Told you it was time to go home—
You didn't remember home.
Your father stared at you
Across the dining room table,
Where years ago
You'd asked, "May I be excused, sir",
For the last time, age thirteen.
He saw
Your intravenous stigmata
(A few inches misplaced);
Remembered
Your ungodly communion,
Your profane eucharist,
And he was afraid.
He cast you out a second time,
And in the bushes by the side of the road
You threw up the fish and chips
He'd bought for supper that night—
Bitter black vomit
That stung your throat.
XIII
Forty days you wandered,
Refused temptation,
Then sought out your own kind;
Showed up late,
The last one, the Twelfth.
There was no one
To tell you,
"One of you shall surely betray me."
(And you don't remember it, but)
In the back of your mind,
God finally heard
What you so long ago prayed,
And He quietly whispered,
Thou hast said.