Reaching Forever. Philip C. Kolin
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virgins. Or there’s “A Simple Ten-Minute Procedure,” which reveals the too-often-unspoken-of aftershocks of abortion, where the lost baby
still woke her at night
with soft screams that continued
for hours. Her husband never heard
them, no matter how hard
she tried to make him listen.
The child cried about why and how
his life could go so quickly
before he could enjoy breathing.
But all he had
were memories of forceps
cradling him down
a sterile sink, a savage womb.
But then again there’s the mercifully longer section called “Sheep,” where Kolin focuses once again on our worthy and underrated marginalized. Take, for instance, Christmas in New York for that homeless man in his cardboard manger, “His welcome mat... printed in one language” and “read in another,” who just might read “angels in the snowflakes/ raining down,” as he “listens to the moon splashing/ light on him at the Winter Solstice.” Or the orphan, recalling a drug-addicted “mother’s purple eyes/ and frosted lips,” feeding him through a needle.
In one of those rare moments, the poet turns the lens on his own scarred youth in “A Night in Lisle,” a Catholic orphanage just outside Chicago’s limits, where a small boy, separated for a time from a mother unable to find work, hopes to be comforted by the nun at the night desk “from which sole light emanates,” but who instead sends him scurrying back to his bed. “We prayed to the Father to rescue us,” he tells us,
but he came only a few times each year
and then to carry one or two of us off
with a cold smile, folded now under
rubber sheets zipped,
to be harvested.
Mercifully, mercifully, there are God’s sheep as well to celebrate: those who smell like God’s sheep because they do God’s work. Like God’s bakers, those monks from St. Benedict in Louisiana, who three days a week cross Lake Pontchartrain to feed those “exiled from their own identity/ in the national void of halfway/ houses, shelters, nursing homes, jails,” like Brother Joseph in his “old delivery van – a 1999 Chevy Astro– . . . packed full of bread” then returning to the monastery “bursting/ with the scent of myrtle.” Or Father Daniel Francis Derivaux, like Merton a Gethsemane monk, “called to be a prisoner of Christ” “at Parchman Penitentiary/ teaching unschooled monks in striped habits/ to sigh the name of Jesus.” Or one more nameless unwed mother, trying desperately to feed her baby from the leftovers of those vast dumpsters in our indifferent cities.
And on it goes, in poem after blessed poem, forever reaching out toward God’s forever, which we sheep have been promised. And yet, and yet. In spite of the darkness and the pain and the losses, what can we—approaching our own deaths—hope for, after all, when God finally arrives? “Let your eyes write/new tears for a pilgrimage/ to a place you cannot see,” this poet who has clearly paid the price tells us.
Wait for the darkness, for it is out of the darkness, as the prophets and the saints have so often reminded us, that he will call for us. And don’t try to image what being in His image will mean. That is beyond our imaginations, for God “lives in infinity,” and “whispers fire and speaks/ in endless vowels.” And as His train passes by, as it did for Moses on that high mountain, it will evaporate continents along with our “black-plumed sins,” and suddenly, mercifully, astonishingly, you will “realize you do not/ have to wear/ your body anymore.”
Baptism
Under God’s sky-full hands
waters around continents
peak in coral and turquoise,
reefs bejeweled with fins and fans
from the artist whose canvas
must be submerged
to be seen.
So too with souls—
left alone and earthed
in the deceitful mirror
of time’s fooled sufficiency
they erode into scrubbed limestone,
unpretty quarries.
But pooled into fonts,
wells, and tides,
they acquire a majesty
happily not of their own making.
A Pond is Heaven’s Scroll
Though conscripted
of earth and water, the pond
rewrites itself as heaven’s scroll.
The pilgrimage of the moon
dallies above it
in the mud-coated night
imprinting its image
in the willowy water that
Li Po lost his life trying to catch.
Fish ripple haloed messages
in Vadic and Tau across
a shoal of blue slate.
Yet a blind man can read
these oracles better
than spectacled scholars.
On sun-shallow days
you can hear the rocks
coffined in sludge
and slime cry to heaven —
sinners who hoarded
wealth and wrath.
A stillness finally seals the pond —
heaven’s last incarnation
for those who forgo mortality.
Reading Ponds
A retired businessman, escaped
from his scheduled life,
trolls in yellow waders through
the braille letters the pond writes
for a country of clouds,
a message he cannot read.
A spinster—silk tulip
in her straw hat—sighs
for the lovers she never had,
and tosses a stone into the pond.
Do the circles call to her,
or does she call to them?
Convent hymns fill the pond
with prayers and petitions
as a novice in her late twenties
looks into it as in a mirror.
A fish ripples her images—
a confirmation she is losing
her pride or a warning
about taking final vows?
A flock of mallards passes overhead.
Perhaps the pond weeps as they pass;
or are they trapped in the long silence
that quiets them