That Word Read online

  Also by Jamie Parsley

  Paper Doves, Falling and Other Poems (1992)

  The Loneliness of Blizzards (1995)

  Cloud: a poem in 2 acts (1997)

  The Wounded Table (1999)

  earth into earth, water into water (2000)

  no stars, no moon (2004)

  Ikon (2005)

  Just Once (2007)

  This Grass (with paintings by Gin Templeton) (2009)

  Fargo, 1957: an elegy (2010)

  Crow (2012)

  That Word

  poems by

  JAMIE PARSLEY

  North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

  St. Cloud, Minnesota

  Copyright © 2014 Jamie Parsley

  All rights reserved.

  Print ISBN 978-0-87839-755-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-87839-985-7

  Published by

  North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

  P.O. Box 451

  St. Cloud, Minnesota 56302

  northstarpress.com

  Acknowledgments

  Special gratitude to my mother, Joyce Parsley; to the congre­gation of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Fargo, North Dakota; and, as always, to Greg Bachmeier.

  I am grateful to the many people who have listened to these poems and given their feedback on them.

  I am also grateful to the editors of the following publica­tions in which several of these poems were originally published (some in slightly different form):

  The Anglican: “Kyrie” and “Absolution”

  The Ambassador: “The Gathering”

  Albatross: “We Are”

  Avenues: “Trees”

  Burning Light: “Psalm”

  Brighidsphyre: St. Hildegard’s Day”

  The Caller: “That Boy”

  Enso: “Epiclesis,” “Commendation”

  The Fargo Forum: “Fragment” from “3 poems by Yehuda Amichai”

  Immaculata: “Salve”

  The Journey: “Fraction”

  The Living Church: “Agnes Dei”

  Mending Wall: “Job Knew”

  Sangha: “Credo”

  The Sheaf: “That Word”

  Sidewalks: “Troubled”

  Contents

  Also by Jamie Parsley

  Acknowledgments

  I. The Feast of the Holy Cross

  The Feast of the Holy Cross

  Wailing

  Gray

  “Salve”

  First Frost

  St. Hildegard’s Day

  Earth

  We are

  This Boy

  Others

  That Word

  These Men

  Resurrection

  The Gathering

  Wire

  II. Requiem

  Vigil and Absolution

  The Preparation

  Procession

  Kyrie

  Job knew

  Psalm

  Descent

  Troubled

  Credo

  Anamnesis

  Epiclesis

  Sanctus

  Fraction

  Agnes Dei

  Postcommunion

  Commendation

  Notes

  About the Poet

  “We are afraid

  Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare

  Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.”

  —W.H. Auden

  I. The Feast of the Holy Cross

  “When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite

  To my own heart! I yield you do come sometimes; but

  That piecemeal peace is poor peace.”

  —Gerard Manley Hopkins

  The Feast of the Holy Cross

  1.

  Every road from here

  leads to despair. Will I

  ever return to those

  places we knew and loved?

  Can I travel

  those roadways

  only weeks and months ago

  we drove together?

  No, I cannot—

  no more than I can travel

  the road you planned for us

  to take in some future that has now

  evaporated in an instant—

  its imprint left in my eyes

  like the sudden blinding star-filled

  flash of a camera bulb.

  2.

  Last Lent you listened patiently to me

  as you always did

  and wrestled two beams of pale wood into place.

  And for weeks, it leaned there against the stone wall,

  draped by the white shroud

  I wound around its crossbeam,

  promising us a victory

  I can only, in this moment,

  fantasize about

  and wish were true.

  And now, sooner than it ever should be,

  Lent has descended again,

  this time just as summer dies

  and autumn bites the air

  with dull teeth.

  It goes on around us

  just as an apprehensive spring thaw does.

  And here, every instrument of torture lies before me—

  the sponge, offered but not taken

  stinking slightly of gin—

  the thorns, so freakishly large

  I ponder what plant

  grows them

  this size—

  the three spikes, the same size and weight

  as those you often picked up from the abandoned railroads

  and brought to me with a sense of triumph—

  the lance, leaning in one direction

  ready to pierce a heart

  that has already sputtered out and failed—

  the ladder, which ascends

  beyond us

  even as we sing

  The ladder is long, if it is strong and well-made

  has stood hundreds of years and is not yet decayed

  Sept 14

  Wailing

  Who is it?—

  here in this car I drive at break-neck speed

  to your bedside?

  Whose sound echoes against the tan interior

  of this morning drive

  toward the place you lie—

  cold and peaceful and the color of ash?

  Me! It’s me!

  It’s my voice making a sound

  I never heard it make before.

  It’s me—

  wailing! wailing

  and keening

  against the cracked

  windshield.

  It’s my wailing—

  my siren-sound

  that crescendos

  until it grows hoarse

  and guttural.

  Listen to me! Anyone! Listen!

  O mighty Ear,

  who listens to all I have ever said,

  listen!

  Listen to this wordless anguish,

  this razor-sharp exhaust that comes

  from someplace within me

  I never

  until this moment knew existed.

  Listen! That’s all I ask.
>
  I don’t want nor even expect an answer—

  a divine erasing of what I know

  I must face at the end of this drive,

  of that destruction that awaits me

  when I touch the breaks

  and nudge the gearshift into park.

  By that time, a biting silence

  will enfold me

  and I will not say a thing.

  I will have closed into myself

  as easily as he closed into himself

  and died.

  My voice then will be gone.

  It has already changed forever

  and I will never sound, a moment from now,

  as I did earlier today,

  when I awoke from my fitful sleep

  and sang, for the last time,

  the psalms of joy I sang

  before I knew of

  what waited me.

  Sept 14

  Gray

  The colors drain.

  They have all fled—

  pouring through the day

  and circling at the drain

  before finally

  descending

  into that shadowy under-world.

  That place of Technicolor expectation

  toward which I have been striving

  all my life

  has given away

  to this colorless reality.

  Even the pale gray color in my eyes

  is no longer gray.

  Our colors have faded away

  and we are left

  staring at the mirrors

  and seeing

  ourselves reflected back only as we would be

  in photos taken in some other time and place.

  We fake our smiles and force

  fake luster into our eyes.

  Whatever sparkle we muster

  is the kind of luster we receive

  on overcast days

  when the sun loses its brilliance.

  Let’s smile!

  Let’s wipe the moist pools

  from beneath our eyes

  and let us smile,

  even if what stares back is only

  the color of pencil lead

  and concrete.

  Sept 15

  “Salve”

  Bent over! at the waist.

  This is the agony you carry

  not in your shoulders

  or across your outstretched arms

  but in your gut—

  in the very core

  and center of your body.

  You ache

  and roil under this pain

  which comes up from deep within you

  the way adrenaline does.

  Or panic.

  Not the trauma of the crash of vehicles

  or the dark mass that grew

  once within you

  in that most vital of places

  compares to this misery.

  This is much worse—

  more horrible than such lashing.

  Carry it in your belly,

  just as she,

  whom you sing “Salve” to

  each night

  carried within hers

  a Word you cling to—

  desperate and wild-eyed—

  in moments

  just like this.

  Sept 16

  First Frost

  (Wei Ying-wu)

  1.

  Like dyed silk

  or wood burned to ash

  I am haunted by you—

  you, who left

  and will not now ever come back.

  You, who respected me

  in ways fathers never respect sons.

  I came to you

  in a troubled time.

  After years of loss and sorrow—

  after your first wife

  turned heel and left,

  deserting your house

  and leaving only its emptiness to you—

  my mother

  and, later, me

  came to you

  and undid your pain

  as one undoes a stitch.

  Oh, stop fantasizing

  I tell myself.

  But how does one stop what one feels?

  At moments, the dream I dreamed of you last night

  is almost real.

  Shaken by its reality

  I wring my hands

  and mimic my shadow on the wall.

  This grief is relentless.

  It won’t let me even lie down.

  And around your house

  the weeds you hated

  grow thick and brown,

  and the sparrows you loved

  and fed each morning

  with seed in the bird bath

  shiver and starve,

  picking at bare ground

  and weeds.

  2.

  The frost you predicted

  the Sunday before you died

  settled on the grass this morning,

  white as the cloth they wrapped you in

  before they wrestled your muscled girth

  past your chair

  and through the door you wrestled into place

  just last year.

  Today I must leave

  for an overnight trip.

  I used to go

  without a second thought

  knowing that the road

  on which I returned

  led to this same door

  and your presence on the other side.

  Now, I head into this cold

  and too-early sleet.

  What I carry with me

  is swallowing me up.

  It makes me more bitter

  than this wind

  which drive against me.

  The further away I go

  the slower I drive.

  The wind spills handfuls of snow

  into my path.

  The geese wail

  and scatter to the south.

  How many times did

  you and I travel this same road?

  Did I ever imagine then

  I would drive it again

  without you?

  Sept 16

  St. Hildegard’s Day

  “You are . . . a citizen of sacredness.”

  —Hildegard of Bingen

  After transferring the ashes

  from the temporary plastic

  to the permanent weight

  of cultured marble

  I am helpless to know

  what to do with the dust-caked

  silicone bag,

  the polyurethane box

  or, for that matter, the upper plate of plastic teeth

  he set in water in those last moments

  before he lay down on his bed

  and descended into that last, long sleep.

  I carefully fold the bag

  and place the blue container of teeth

  into the empty urn—

  everything fitting together

  as perfectly as parts of

  an engine come together.

  I walk into the trees

  he planted—

  where he placed each flowering twig

  into the tilled earth

  and nurtured them until they

  doubled and tripled and exhaled

 
beyond their limits,

  stretching up toward a sky

  that today promises so little.

  And there, with his shovel,

  I dig into the roots,

  piercing the pale veins

  that burrow and twist there—

  thick as earthworms—

  patting hard the earthen walls

  as he taught me to do .

  Here I put the box

  and here it will stay, covered in roots

  and dirt the consistency of tobacco.

  I hope I will forget this place.

  If any memory can be extinguished in my mind

  let it be this one.

  Let it die as easily he did,

  in one long night that

  descends and will never again lift

  into a dawn we long to come to us

  with a brilliance that stuns us into silence.

  Sept 17

  Earth

  How is it that he—

  all muscles

  and mass—

  could be reduced

  to something

  so disposable

  and minuscule?

  Bone pieces, ash, dust,

  the staples

  of the surgery

  I drove him to

  one cold winter morning

  just last year—

  they lie there,

  useless now