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The Ghost of God
dreaming in marble all the
castle lay
like some gigantic ghost-flower born of night
blossoming in white towers to the moon. . .
e.e.cummings, “of Nicolette” from Tulips and Chimneys,
1923
. . . the endless and tragic recollection that is history.
Patricia Hampl, A Romantic Education, Section, “St. Paul—The Garden”
Lynn Strongin
Contents
i. Such a Box
ii. Wars of Age
I. Such a Box
Mercy Street seems far away these November days.
Winter’s world: maybe
it’s like an icon: only after patient study, and prayerful reflection, does it
begin to speak to us. When image of frozen lake, bleak woods, and stark white
sky connect, they speak to our inner heart, searching for God. Nonetheless, the
sky is American Indigo, over the frozen plains as over Ironville, New York. Our
purpose is survival, and without love that cannot wash.
But how could we expect
ourselves to walk hand-in-hand with hope right now? Our mothers might step off
the shelf of earth into the sky, at any moment. Disillusion must be our sombre, our October, November, and December
companion.
I hear a knocking down
the hall. “Who’s there?” I cry. But only silence answers.
Day’s built of bridges, I cross the bridge of
afternoon to evening and phone Erin who feels as though her left arm is falling
off her body. Phone to ask about mailing the soldier’s letters in a manuscript
box which I describe: like foolscap, it seems to be extinct, about 91/2 inches
by 12. I wonder if she’s seen one, where they’re to be found.
A simple answer comes
back, “I have such a box.”
ii. The Wars of Age
Such a box as this body,
this life, warring for vision in old age when the eyes deteriorate and
weaken—such a box as this, is it worth fighting for?
“Have fifty thousand copies of this printed at
once and mailed,—” the dream
telegraph comes.
The reason I am
pessimistic, suspicious when communication falls off between parties is that,
perhaps, coming from the granite state, New Hampshire, reared with a boot-strap
philosophy, I know no answer is simple, I know chill silences bode death.
“When Colleen was called
to work, because her family were in debt, she stepped right up to the plate,”
says Erin.
Pascal is trying to
figure a way for her friend, Renee, to be able to reach the pears at the top of
her tree, now it is October, late October, near November, and the pears are
green.
“I suggested, odd as it sounds, they get a monkey.”
“A monkey?”
“Yes. They could reward him with eating one of the fruit. Monkeys are clever and like to clamber.”
The part of the body
which is paralyzed is heavy, one drags it along, it grows cold. As long as the paralyzed part is not the
memory, the night ignites and burns. Where the men have left off
hammering—the house of the Heaven Woodsman should stand, hewn of golden logs,
fresh timber which bleeds rosin.
. . . As I try to sleep these nights, to lasso it
the way the horseshoe does the nail, as I read our plans for “Letters of a
Soldier” would not fit “very comfortably” into America’s oldest University
Press, I think, of course not. Not Balto, home of that austere
institution whose gentility is as resounding in overtones as the magnolia are
scenting the roads of the deep south.
(Where, Soldier, will I find the place for you and
me?)
There is the temptation to sense the death of God
everywhere. I’m tempted by the early summer death of the young man in a
terrifying highway crash which left the victims unidentifiable so eaten away by
flames. In the wars of age whose battles are not dignified, but dispiriting:
eyes weaken, so does one’s grip on the wheel, one’s voice tenor even trembles
like a flame threatened by the strong wind of mortality.
>Yet it is not God’s death, so much as his ghost I
discern in filmy white garment floating above, and then below the harvest moon.
>“Is it you?” I call out down the hall.
But no one
answers. Only the wind. The child prepares for first communion, which should be
the happiest day of his life, but he has a lump in his throat and will be sick
at the supper after, giving up, as it were, the body and blood of Christ. But,
he will be, like the child dying of typhoid fever in the hospital, actually
turning it all around: gaining a new body of blood.
. . . This is not May, it is November. The
monkey goes climbing the tree in the primitive painting reaching gracefully,
with delicate paw, for the orange-white moon flowers, the moon fruit. Erin is
in dream at the other end of the block, faintly smiling, as the ghost of God
washes over her too and she smiles, a smile she will never know, never see in
the glassy mirror of winter when she wakes to another morning in old age,
shortly after dawn. The ex-Olympic swimmer (whom she will never see) rises in
our building, her seventy-year-old body retaining the grace of the runner, the
swimmer she was at thirty and forty and even fifty.
“How are you?”
She shakes her head.
“Let’s get together when you’re well.”
“I won’t get well. I have a disease.”
>When she writes me of the river, my friend, she
becomes a different person, a poet telling me the current of the river has been
switched North to South—or is it an optical illusion due to thunderstorm over
the prairies this early winter afternoon?-- even though her life seems to be
flowing in the wrong direction.
The
jackhammer starts up in the street, the torchres will come with their hooded,
cupped flames. Their purpose is to torch, as ours is to love: we
each have a driver at opposite extremes. But despite all this, and the feeling
Mercy Street is far away, it could be an optical illusion: Why couldn’t now
be the appointed hour, now the acceptable time? But for what, and by whom, we
are only able to fathom without bringing the words of thanks in grace to our
tongues.
To such a box as the body—we are born. In such a
box as a house, we establish living. In the right-angled crucible of flame we
are refined. . .In such a boxed thing we may collapse, but are carried out at
last in a garment frail, light as wind which may be God.
If it is Ironville, if the walls are miraculously
translucent metal—like bronze—moving under the weight and shadow of mortality
as we do, we may well have just such a box as will contain the treasured
text—for all time which children will recite, looking back at the tragic road
of history, but ahead at the golden road which is the future, where a sign
called Jubilation may be hung.
Lynn Strongin (b. NYC 1939) grew up in
and around New York and in certain parts of
the rural South which made a deep impression
on her. Parents of Eastern European
Jewish ancestors raised her in a rich artistic
environment. Her memoir Indigo is based
largely on these two locales. Chapters of
Indigo have appeared in various venues
such as StorySouth, Atlantic /3711, Verb
Sap, The Square Table, Riverbabble and in Italy’s Storie. “Audubon
Wallpaper,” a chapter which came out first in StorySouth was
nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She will have twelve books out by
mid-2006, among them the anthology The Sorrow Psalms;A Book
of Twentieth Century Elegy to be published by the University of
Iowa Press, June 2006. Her work appears in over thirty anthologies,
seventy journals. In the Sixties, she worked for poet Denise Levertov
in the political environment of Berkeley. Most recently her prose
has appeared in The Dublin Review. For the past twenty-five years
she has made Victoria, British Columbia her home.
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