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
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 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