Spencer Reece - The Secret Gospel of Mark

Cover

ALSO BY SPENCER REECE

POETRY

The Clerks Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)

The Road to Emmaus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

EDITOR

Counting Time Like People Count Stars (Tia Chucha Press, 2017)

WATERCOLORS

All the Beauty Still Left: A Poets Painted Book of Hours (Turtle Point Press, 2021)

The Secret Gospel of Mark

A POETS MEMOIR

Spencer Reece

Seven Stories Press

New York Oakland Liverpool

Copyright 2021 by Spencer Reece

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Seven Stories Press
Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
sevenstories.com

College professors and high school and middle school teachers may
order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press books. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com, or fax request on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reece, Spencer, author.
Title: The secret gospel of Mark : a poets memoir / by Spencer Reece.
Description: New York, NY : Seven Stories Press, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020043137 (print) | LCCN 2020043138 (ebook) | ISBN
9781644210420 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781644210437 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Reece, Spencer. | Poets, American--Biography. | Gay
clergy--United States--Biography. | Poetry--History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PS3618.E4354 Z46 2020 (print) | LCC PS3618.E4354
(ebook) | DDC 811/.6 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043137
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043138

For John Crowley, John DesLauriers, Hugo Garca Garca
believers

The healed wound is not the disappeared wound.
JEANETTE WINTERSON

Contents

O Love, How Did You Get Here?

I am myself the matter of my book.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

When there is no faith joy is destroyed. At eighteen, I wanted to die. Up there, in Brunswick, Maine, the first state to greet the morning sun, at the far corner of the graveyard was an old toolshed, a light gray color, painted so often the wood slats had the consistency of frosting. I moved quickly to the small crooked door that was never locked. Inside, the chilly room was the size of a sacristy, just enough room if you spread out your arms to spin around. The place smelled of coffin sawdust, plastic flowers, and metal tools. There was an odd crinkled map with the layout of the graveyard and numbers for each square.

I peered around to make sure no one had followed me. Then I stripped, hungry and desperate. I ripped my clothes off. My underwear landed in a coffin. Nude, steaming, I shook like a bell struck. I took out the stolen Playgirl magazine Id sequestered in my backpack and slammed it open on the coffin planks. My hands shook. I shook. I straddled the planks atop two saw horses. Slivers caught in my upper inner thighs. I galloped like a cowboy, a giddy-up swirl of saliva, sweat, and chuffing. Then I shuddered, sputtered, spumed, squirted, shot. My face grew taut like Christs on the cross. A need claimed me and left me gratified. The toolshed stilled. The pines stilled. The graves observed my act and went back to their talk with each other. A dead hive above me stuck there like a dusty cherub. The nude mans limbs on the glossy centerfold stuck together from my semen with the consistency of egg yolks.

What an astonishment! I couldnt stop my body from this hunt and release upon those nude altarpieces. I drank with similar push-pull greed. I said to myself, I will never do this again. But within a week, Id be back in that toolshed. My armpits sweat. I wiped myself with a handkerchief left by a mourner. Yet the spice of my act lingered on me and in me and through me. I asked the universe to exterminate me like a rat. I thought God heard me.

Buttoned up, magazine hidden in my backpack, I went back to my dorm room at Bowdoin and held Sylvia Plaths Ariel once more, opening and closing the book like a door to a room. I stared at the white spaces around those poems as much as the poems themselves. I looked at the title poem:

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

I was her I. I wanted to turn into dew. In the poem Plath recalls riding her horse, which, Id read in the footnotes from our class anthology, she had named Ariel. The poems rhythm galloped forward with its crazed logic. The syllables shot off like rockets. I liked saying the end of the poem, the way all the vowels in suicidal and dew and cauldron and morning rolled around like marbles in my mouth. I liked the way I and do showed up as eye and dew, repeating themselves, the way the marriage vow repeats, I do, and I do, and the way that echoed the story of her failed marriage to the English poet Ted Hughes. The promise of the ordinary conventional life was failing me. I wanted to gallop off the page of the poem and out of the world as she had done, even as I hid in the poem from the world. What had she harnessed with language? Id memorized the piece, for I liked saying it as much as reading it: the thing sort of galloped in my mouth . It worked on me like a charm.

Id learned in my Shakespeare class that Ariel was the ephemeral spirit from The Tempest who at the plays end was set free from the island by Prospero. Ariel had been instrumental in the matchmaking of Miranda and Ferdinand and so freedom was granted for Ariel. I could see the irony in Plath picking a character connected to matchmaking when her own matchmaking had been a disaster. Furthermore, in poem after poem, Plaths suicide plans were setting her free from her British island. The poet played Russian roulette on the page. The poems married freedom to death. Her anger, her freedomthe poems reached deep into my guts.

I had stopped going to my economics, Greek, and ethology classes. My absence did not disturb. My notebooks went blank. I tried my hand at a few poems from my manual typewriter. I mainly echoed Plath. As the snowy weeks went on I started disappearing. I wasnt in the lunch room, then wasnt at parties or theater rehearsals, then struggled to appear anywhere. I was wearing a sweatshirt from my prep schoola dull blue, tattered at the neck, the schools golden name faded over my heart. Id worn the same sweatshirt for over a month. I gave off a musty scent. My hair had gone greasy. I was erasing and erasing myself. I was a palimpsest. What lay beneath down to the bone was hate and shame. If you scraped the bone the marrow revealed zero love for me.

By nine p.m. the Friday night before Christmas break I was drinking Southern Comfort alone in my room. My roommates were out. Theyd mainly kept to themselves as a catatonia overtook me that first term. A letter to my grandmother in Connecticut remained unfinished on my desk. My mind jittered. One bottle drunk I chugged a second. I exited Moore Hall, my flat-roofed Georgian four-story brick dorm with many white-trimmed paned windows. I moved away. I heard behind me the laughter of my classmates hooting in the zoo of rooms. Many of the panes of glass had fogged up from human heat. I looked back at the dorm where they had laughed at methe faggot.

The beautiful black Maine night propelled me; it pushed me like a deep cold riverdragging with it the reflections of the cold stars; the same stars dragged behind me like the tin cans attached to a car after a wedding. Stars announced my marriage to the night. Silence pitched me further forward. Alcohol tickled the back of my throat, electrified my nerves, accelerated my walk. Christmas was coming.