CIX

Don March 23rd, 2010

CIX

Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”

There is an old recording of Flannery O’Connor giving an interview on Wise Blood for an early television program.  If you haven’t had the privilege of seeing it, you can read the poem it inspired.  If you have, you can judge how well I captured it in another medium.  The poem was published in New Oxford Review, March, 1982, p. 24.

For Flannery

The body was alive.  The evidence

Is that her fingers for pure nervousness

Caressed the chair’s arm, and that was enough;

The rest was calm, the eyes demure.  The voice

Was slow and hesitant, but when it had

A chance to build momentum it could carry

The burden of a thought or two and drive them

Directly, if gently, toward the heart of things.

(The eyes would look up then as if to follow

The words and make sure they were going straight.)

The body was alive; there is no doubt.

A fifteen-minute strip of celluloid

Is proof, and there are other witnesses

Whose bodies are still living, and will be,

I reckon, for another couple decades.

The body is cold dust and brittle bone

And blind as Hazel Motes.  But take the cold,

Thin strip of plastic, add electric light,

A motor, and some other gadgetry,

It will be warm and soft again, or seem so.

We most of us belong to Hazel’s church:

Our lame don’t walk, our blind don’t see, our dead

Stay put, our Jesus has no blood to spare,

Despite what we recite on Sunday mornings.

The body stalks from tree to tree behind us.

Its hands fidget in embarrassment;

Its eyes occasionally look up.  (Be sure

That’s only in the mind.  The body still

Lies quiet—even now the bones are cumbling.)

Be sure you do not look into the eyes.

If once you do, you are forever lost,

Your well-adjusted modern life in shambles.

Jesus, striding through the point of light

Behind the pupils, will lay hold of you.

“The prophet that I raise up from her words

Will burn your eyes clean!”   There will be no way

To keep out even resurrections then,

Or Jesus’ blood.  And you will see the body

Living, and it will not be on film.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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