Happiness depends on your attitude.

Cliche, I know, but thank you sign at Idaho Falls Chiropractic Clinic P.A. for reminding me how to be happy this morning.

I needed that, because your words brought this to mind:

Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God. [...]

[...] [A]s God has designed our happiness—and the happiness of all His creatures, he never has—He never will institute an ordinance or give a commandment to His people that is not calculated in its nature to promote that happiness which He has designed, and which will not end in the greatest amount of good and glory to those who become the recipients of his law and ordinances. (TPJS: 255-56; online source.)

And I really needed that, too.

Rua: An Elegy in Holes (Poem): Take Two

(Yes. Another poem. Or merely a take two from last week.)

After the feedback I got on this one, I've made some revisions so that it's more, I hope, charitable to readers. And while I like this version better, I am only one reader.

So, readers: what do you make of the changes (i.e. the stanza breaks and conclusion)?

* * * *

Rua: An Elegy in Holes

My journal propped to the day you fell around the earth, dropped to a point I can only approximate anymore with a secondhand map, some tacks, and a string to slice away the pudding skin of memory, I prop these skin-thin proofs in my aperture casement, watch you drop through my hunger by layers

like when we excavated the neighbor’s sandbox, made the hole so deep we could map every sheet of clay, stand tip-toed, arms raised against the grave, voice leveled into soil, and still hide from the world, though Mom still managed to find us, conjugating our name in the breeze—she must have mapped our desire from the womb, known we’d eventually start digging holes to contain the fire licking our bones,

the lust that’s propped me in the window of your first Auckland flat to watch you unpack—shirts, slacks, socks, shoes, suits, the nightly routine you’ve worn so long it’s threadbare at the knees; to air the ethereal between us with a length of mist, foreign soil, and mid-summer breeze, the line you’ll hang memories on after rain until they’re dry enough to take notes on, to slide into your billfold

beside NZ dollars creased in thirds, ridges grimy with the island’s fingerprints, like my camera lens, blurred by the hands of Māori kids trying to climb inside, to drop into this hole we’ve dug and prop themselves against the walls, their synaptic bodies nimble between word and memory, spun into gray matter knit breath and flesh into the triptych of my soul.

Fourth Month Rosary (Poem)

Because I don't feel much like blogging today, I'm doing it anyway. But you're just getting another poem: "Fourth Month Rosary," which was originally published in Irreantum 9.2/10.1 (even though I said I wouldn't be posting it here because it was published there first. So sue me). I just got the new issue of Irreantum in the mail yesterday, so I don't feel so about stealing some of their thunder.

(As a sidenote: Bruce W. Jorgensen has an essay in the issue titled "Reading About Sex in Mormon Fiction---If We Can Read," which I was excited to read. But he let me down and seemed kind of condescending, which was really disappointing in light of the conversations that have been taking place lately at AMV---here, here, and here---and earlier at Thutopia. But more on that in a later post.)

Anyway.

* * * *

Fourth Month Rosary

I’m spotting,
she says,

holding her underwear
so I can see

the crimson-brown
beads.

She hands them off,
asks, What

should I do?
then turns,

without
my answer,

to call her OB. I
walk to the sink

and, hands
churning

beneath a string
of water, wash

the soiled fabric
with prayers.

Originally published in Irreantum 9.2 (2007)/10.1 (2008).

For the Sycamore (Poem)

Here's another from Browns and Rusts. I'm unsure how it reads outside of my head. Feedcrack welcome.

For the Sycamore
(On Zaccheus)

She’s always been the narrative crux,
her branches grown thick
as his presence in Luke, raising
his faith so he can anoint God’s head
with his sweat, her shadow pinned tight
to the Teller’s canopied bosom of words.

She’s no different here in her browns
and rusts, peering down the blouse
of my soul from the artist’s throng,
playing my gaze through the spaces
between her sprawling geography.
She frames her fruit well on that throne

of a branch where he sits mid-startle
against the plot twist, holding his perch
to keep from falling too hard
on his faith. Yet the centuries
nearest her act, the children of the children
of the child nearest the viewing pane—

see how she tilts her head toward the throng,
mouth wide; tries to suckle
from the tale—forget; even Zaccheus
moves on after Christ points him out, calls him
down, invites himself over for tea
with the publican and his family.

But Christ’s finger reaches
beyond his words, beyond pigment, beyond
the curving branch of the sycamore
he touches at last. Always
to the Garden. To the serpent. And
Eve, knowledge dripping from her lips

like juice pressed from a thousand figs
as Adam walked in from the cool of day
and she reached to fit his waist
with the apron
she’d learned to make from her Mom.

Ronald Wilcox: "Portrait of a Puritan"

I've been reading my way through the poetry published in Dialogue for a project I'm working on (note: I absolutely love the searchable DVD archive they sent me for my recent contribution) and I discovered a long poem by Ronald Wilcox: "Quantum Gospel: A Mormon Testimony." (The link leads to the table of contents for volume 40.2 [Summer 2007]; I wish the poem was accessible elsewhere, but it's not. Sorry. The journal's got to make some dough somehow, I guess.) It explores, among other things, the connections between nature/creation/the universe, the individual, and God. One of my favorite lines from the poem is this: "My flesh is wrapped about schisms of intentions."

But enough teasing.

Because "Quantum Gospel" kind of swept me off my feet (even though I don't completely understand it---hooray for re-reading!), I thought I'd look up some of his other Dialogue published poems and found that he's also published in Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems (with a longer version of "Multiplicity," another striking poem I must return to). Of his other poems, I thought I'd direct you to "Portrait of a Puritan" with this post.

In this poignant short poem, the poet paints a word picture of a young man "who hangs between two [socio-cultural] poles / (approval/disapproval) / who fits or does not fit / the occasion according to conscience" (lines 2-5). In other words, he's caught between two worlds: between strict adherence to the prudish traditions and cultural mores and adherence to his conscience, which sometimes seems at crossways with his community. (Sound familiar to anyone?)

But what is he to do? Having been brought up within this distinctive cultural "cant" (or, as I read it, cultural bend), however, as the poet reminds us, "[h]is will is not his own" (7-8). He must obey or face some degree of castigation from "[h]is ubiquitous [and preponderant] parent" (9)---representative of the cultural will---who mumbles a perpetual and "inaudible [because culturally implied] no" (13) and whose finger has bookmarked "Ecclesiastes" (14), meaning the parent's life and thought is defined, in large part, by the Preacher and, thus---because how and what we think is to a great degree determined by what we read and the culture we're bound to---by a tendency to preachiness.

But again, as the poet reminds us, his "friend[s]" (15), those who, like him, have a proclivity to question, well, most if not everything: we should leave "him alone" (15). He has his cultural aches and pains, his personal will and desires buried beneath the communal facade. And his dreams are filled with images of freedom: "wind and rain and sky" and "a wild goose cry[ing] / [...] / in the naked night" (16-9). In short, we who consider ourselves more (intellectually, socially, emotionally, sexually, etc.) free should feel for him and seek to remember such tendencies in ourselves. We shouldn't judge so harshly when we see Puritans being, well, Puritan.

I think this is a good example of one way literature can affectively (yes, I mean it with an "a") show a culture something about itself by analogy and metaphor, even---and especially---without being overtly didactic.

And I leave the image at that.

Imagine Me, A Missionary

We had the missionaries over for dinner tonight and I did some Mormon letters proselyting of my own. Since my review of Twilight for Dialogue came with three contributor's copies of the journal and since I knew one of the missionaries is somewhat the literary type (last time they were here, we talked about Orson Scott Card and some other books) and since he picked up the copy of Bright Angels and Familiars: Contemporary Mormon Stories that was left (maybe purposefully) on the kitchen counter and spent more than a few minutes looking through it, I gifted him one of my two extra copies of Dialogue and introduced him to Irreantum (Volume 9.2/10.1, which he spent some time reading). And some of our dinner talk was spent discussing literature.

It may have been a distraction, but boy, did it feel good to feign some kind of literary expertise.

Rua: An Elegy in Holes (Poem)

Here's another one from my "Cloudfire" sequence.

Feedcrack welcome (if you lurkers and RSS readers please).

* * * *

Rua*: An Elegy in Holes

My journal propped to the day you fell around the earth, dropped to a point I can only approximate anymore with a secondhand map, some tacks, and a string to slice away the pudding skin of memory, I prop these skin-thin proofs in my aperture casement, watch you drop through my hunger by layers like when we excavated the neighbor’s sandbox, made the hole so deep we could map every sheet of clay, stand tip-toed, arms raised against the grave, voice leveled into soil, and still hide from the world, though Mom still managed to find us, conjugating our name in the breeze—she must have mapped our desire from the womb, known we’d eventually start digging holes to contain the fire licking our bones, the lust that’s propped me in the window of your first Auckland flat to watch you unpack—shirts, slacks, socks, shoes, suits, the nightly routine you’ve worn so long it’s threadbare at the knees—to air the ethereal between us with a length of mist, foreign soil, and mid-summer breeze, the line you’ll hang memories on after rain until they're dry enough to take notes on, to slide into your billfold beside NZ dollars creased in thirds, ridges grimy with the island’s fingerprints, like my camera lens, blurred by the hands of Māori kids who’ve dropped into the hole we dug and propped themselves against the walls, their fingers plugging the dike of memory to keep me from wrapping the world in spools of secondhand wind.

*Māori: (noun) hole, pit, burrow, chasm, grave, store (for provisions), abyss.