Dennis - Practical Gods

Table of Contents

Also by Carl Dennis

POETRY
A House of My Own
Climbing Down
Signs and Wonders
The Near World
The Outskirts of Troy
Meetings with Time
Ranking the Wishes

PROSE
Poetry as Persuasion

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to the editors of the following magazines, in which some of the poems first appeared:

American Poetry Monthly (More Art)

American Poetry Review (Audience)

American Scholar (Eurydice)

The Nation (To a Pagan)

The New Republic (Bash, Bishop Berkeley, History, and On the Bus to Utica)

Pivot (Gelati)

Poetry (Eternal Life, Eternal Poetry, Glory, Jesus Freaks, Not the Idle, Progressive Health, Prophet, Saint Francis and the Nun, School Days, and Sunrise)

Prairie Schooner (The Serpent to Adam)

Salmagundi (The God Who Loves You, Infidels, The Lace Maker, A Letter from Mary in the Tyrol, Progress, and View of Delft)

Tri-Quarterly (May Jen)

I also would like to thank the Rockefeller Center for sponsoring a stay at Bellagio and the Yaddo Corporation for sponsoring stays at Saratoga.

Finally, I would like to thank the generous friends who gave me valuable criticism on all these poems: Charles Altieri, Thomas Centolella, Alan Feldman, Mark Halliday, and Martin Pops.

A PRIEST OF HERMES

The way up, from here to there, may be closed,
But the way down, from there to here, still open
Wide enough for a slender god like Hermes
To slip from the clouds if you give your evenings
To learning about the plants under his influence,
The winged and wingless creatures, the rocks and metals,
And practice his sacred flute or dulcimer.

No prayers. Just the effort to make his stay
So full of the comforts of home he wont forget it,
To build him a shrine he finds congenial,
Something as simple as roofed pillars
Without the darkness of an interior.

If youre lucky, hell want to sit on the steps
Under the stars for as long as you live
And sniff the fragrance of wine and barley
As it blows from the altar on a salty sea breeze.
Hell want, when you die, to offer his services
As a guide on the shadowy path to the underworld.

Not till you reach the watery crossing
Will he leave your side, and even then
Hell shout instructions as you slip from your shoes
And wade alone into that dark river.

SAINT FRANCIS AND THE NUN

The message Saint Francis preached to the birds,
Though not recorded, isnt beyond surmising.
He wanted his fellow creatures to taste the joy
Of singing the hymns he sang on waking,
Hymns of thanksgiving that praised creation.
Granted, the birds had problems with comprehension,
But maybe theyd grasp enough of his earnest tone
To feel that spring shouldnt be taken lightly.
An audience hard to hold, to be sure,
With a narrow attention span, a constant fluttering,
But a lot less challenging than the nun he counseled
Only this morning, a woman still young,
Dying slowly in pain, who asked him
Why if her suffering had a purpose
That purpose couldnt be clarified in a vision.
Why not at least some evidence
That the greater the suffering reserved for her
The smaller the portion reserved for others?
What a balm to be able to think as Jesus did,
That with every difficult breath of hers
Patients in sickbeds around the world
Suddenly found they were breathing easier.
What a relief for Saint Francis these birds are,
Free of the craving for explanation, for certainty
Even in winter, when the grass is hidden. Look!
He calls to them, pointing. Those black specks
There in the snow are seed husks. Think
As you circle down how blessed you are.
But what can he point to in the nuns spare cell
To keep her from wondering why its so hard
For the king of heaven to comfort her?
All she can manage now is to hope for the will
Not to abandon her god, if he is her god,

In his hour of weakness. No time to reply
To the tender homily at her bedside
As she gathers all her strength for the end,
Hoping to cry out briefly as Jesus did
When his body told him he was on his own.

DEPARTMENT STORE

Thou shalt not covet, hardest of the Commandments,
Is listed last so the others wont be neglected.
An hour a day of practice is all that anyone
Can expect you to spare, and in ten years time
You may find youve outgrown your earlier hankering
For your neighbors house, though his is brick
And yours is clapboard, though his contains a family.
Ten years of effort and finally its simple justice
To reward yourself with a token of self-approval.

Stand tall as you linger this evening
In the sweater section of Kaufmanns Department Store
By the case for men not afraid of extravagance.
All will go well if you hold your focus steady
On whats before you and cast no covetous eye
On the middle-aged man across the aisle
In womens accessories as he converses quietly
With his teenaged son. The odds are slim
Theyre going to reach agreement about a gift
Likely to please the woman they live with,
Not with the clash in what theyre wearing,
The father dapper in sport coat and tie, the son
Long-haired, with a ring in his ear and a shirt
That might have been worn by a Vandal chieftain
When he torched a town at the edge of the Empire.

This moment you covet is only a truce
In a lifelong saga of border warfare
While each allows the other with a shake of the head
To veto a possibility as they slowly progress
From umbrellas to purses, from purses to gloves
In search of something bright for the darker moments
When the woman realizes her life with them
Is the only life shell be allotted.

Its only you who assumes the relief on their faces
When they hold a scarf to the light and nod
Will last. The boy will have long forgotten this moment
Years from now when the woman hes courting
Asks him to name a happy time with his dad,
A time of peaceable parley amidst the turmoil.
So why should you remember? Think how angry
Youll be at yourself tomorrow if you let their purchase
Make you unhappy with yours, ashamed
Of a sweater on sale that fits you well,
Gray-blue, your favorite color.

NOT THE IDLE

Its not the idle who move us but the few
Often confused with the idle, those who define
Their project in life in terms so ample
Nothing they ever do is a digression.
Each episode contributes its own rare gift
As a chapter in Moby-Dick on squid or hardtack
Is just as important to Ishmael as a fight with a whale.
The few who refuse to live for the plots sake,
Major or minor, but for texture and tone and hue.
For them weeding a garden all afternoon
Cant be construed as a detour from the road of life.
The road narrows to a garden path that turns
And circles to show that traveling goes only so far
As a metaphor. The day rests on the grass.
And at night the books of these few,
Lined up on their desks, dont look like drinks
Lined up on a bar to help them evade their troubles.