Another part of this series had to do
with a very particular notion.
I was born a Catholic, but it didn't take.
And one of the reasons it didn't take
is that when we moved from the north end of Boston,
my mother, who never did speak much English, even when
she was 18, ran into the Irish Trinity
and she couldn't believe it.
As far as she was concerned, a priest
who could not speak Italian was a fraud.
[LAUGHTER]
How could he speak to God?
And certainly she couldn't speak to him.
And I, at that time, I thought the Irish priesthood was rather
arrogant and petty-minded.
And I found it unpleasant.
And I had trouble with it, but not for long.
I got tired of agonizing.
This is called "A Five Year Step."
And it has to do with some of those experiences.
And my mother's native mistrust, as I
say, of a priest who could not speak God's language,
was basically, I think, what saved me a lot of trouble.
[CLEARS THROAT]
"A Five Year Step."
This began, I guess, when I was about 15,
and it was over by the time I was about 20.
"I don't remember what I was arguing in HH Blanchard's
medieval lit at Tufts and 37.
Something to do with numerology.
And I knew about it the way my cousins
knew baseball statistics, by having been raised inside them.
Though I couldn't prove it.
It does sound plausible, said HHB.
But how do you know if you can't document it?
Remember, we're not discussing how we feel,
but what went on in the mind of the Middle Ages.
That's just the point, I told him.
I was born there.
Or else, I was born beforehand to where they came.
And if it was half of flourish for sweet style sake,
not for a class of dotes to titter at.
Though they had to have that titter.
And let them have it.
It still was half as true as I was born.
Maybe half as true as anyone is born and with no proven
Renaissance to follow.
At least I haven't met Lorenzo's ghost
in any court I've come to, nor Leonardo at the academy,
nor myself of fire with don enough to strike spires
from the day.
Sometimes I think I've made it out of the dark
but not into the light.
There may be light.
But what's in the control room is a glow dim red
as altar tapers and as faithful to the Holy Ghost of needles
on their dials trembling with presences.
As I was born to dim red glows, I
sensed but could not read, except to know that there
are presences and to learn the first of everything
is a lunacy whose chatter starts before us in the dark.
A cave of colored windows where a God's light came down
in shafts bored through his coral stone
closed me in good and evil.
And I was wrong.
My nature's all vain sinful before starting.
I felt his eyes bore and his great grab
reached to sulfurous ores soul deep in half my dreams.
And from the rails and galleries of that dark
and that its pit heads, black flagged orators
of tongues that were never mine summoned me
through to guilt and the Irish Trinity.
Ma wept to hear how God denied his round Italian for a nose
full of south Boston jeremiads.
Nights I could hear her arguing with pa to take the matter up
with San Miguel or with San Giovanni of his own son's name.
But we couldn't be sure he had made it up that high.
What?
We still praying him out of purgatory.
However it was, we never got an answer.
I did what was done to me and fell asleep.
Falling off roofs and clouds to wake
up screaming holding my genitals that had fallen off,
because they belonged to the devil and he'd come for them
and changed me into a girl for punishment.
But in another sleep, I was all escapes.
I killed Cavalcante, who had killed my father.
He shouldn't have driven so fast and ran back home.
And pa himself was there and gave me
wine in three red glasses, because I was his son.
Himself, the tall first number of the bottle
he filled me from.
And ma an eight behind him.
In the two great circles, he had married one.
I didn't know then my dreams were from a mountain
where every town defended its own virgin just as the Greeks
had left her, in a cave.
But I could tell St. Patrick was none of mine.
Though at St. Joe's, his feast day
waved more flags than God broke out for Easter and Christmas
together.
What was I then 13 maybe 14.
Like ma, I half believed I was safe in God
and what God we were safe in.
I couldn't have guessed we were Greeks who spoke ourselves
in bad Italian from a parish of goat thickets
civil war and hot blood on the mountain.
All our saints disguised as Catholic but as mountain rank
as a days sweat on the ledges of the starved who put
their prayers into thickets.
I had left St. Joe's before I left and didn't know it.
It took a clown to rip my thicket loose.
And in came father Ryan blowing his nose
one warm March day, to lather the Sunday school
into his own idea of a hagiological rally
for the big green team.
And sent the mountains sliding down on the cave forever.
His nose well blown, he stood above us outside the altar rail
and worked the boys up to three last green cheers.
Where did St. Patrick come from?
Ireland, the saved screamed.
And where did he bring his blessing?
Again, Ireland.
And where did your fathers come from?
Once again, he got his chorus, but he lost my soul.
I heard a bellowing of lunatic treason, from Italy, by God.
And didn't know I was the lunatic till he grabbed my ear
and dragged me to the altar.
Pray for your soul.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, I'd be damned first.
I stamped out of there running the wrong raids of the blind
who have no world or would sooner
knock it over than be trapped.
Later, he said I stamped my heel on his instep.
I won't deny it.
He did limp for two weeks.
And world as it was though, I was
innocent by memory and intention.
I'd use that trick a time or two to make a fool let go.
I'd had my skull cracked once for being slow.
And Toots Fitzgerald still has a bad shoulder
from learning I learned fast.
He ran me down with obvious intent
to teach me something I wasn't inclined to learn.
He was 15 and I was a snotty 10 the day of our lesson.
Though as it happened, I ended up
teaching him what I hadn't learned myself before I did it.
I took off down the middle of Summer Street
but with too little start.
Toots pounded after, five good years faster,
and had me or would have had me in one more step.
But when I heard his breath hot at my shoulder,
I dropped into a ball and tripped him on the fly.
He hit macadam like a potato sack dropped off a truck.
And may have been still skidding by the time
I jumped the Kerry's fence and was home safe.
I didn't stay around to pick him up.
His father came that night and wanted ma
to pay for a doctor and a ruined coat.
But even he when he saw me could figure out,
Toots had five years, better than 20 pounds, and at least
a foot and a few inches on me.
He had to admit, I weighed in as the defender and that was that.
I took my beating later when Toots could run again.
Off to one side.
He'd learned to avoid my wake.
And when he caught me, he only hit for form sake.
Better that then take a rock in the head
when he wasn't looking.
He knew it, and I knew it, and we were quits.
But I didn't know I knew it till it was done.
And even then I wasn't sure of who
had done it, for me or to me.
Nor even what had been done.
The day I broke up Father Ryan's rally for the big green saint
was one more education than what I have known about myself, even
to guess about.
Till I lay hiding among the river cattails, red as murder,
and filling the wax museum with bloody poses of Trovatore
howling down on Carmen with without blades out and no one
giving an inch, while Rigoletto opened his bloody sack.
That was beside a river too, I remembered.
And the goddamn duke picking up the wrong cue,
kept yelling la commedia è finita.
I played it out, my belly in a knot and the weather
slanting cold into the night.
I'd gone to communion that morning.
I could hear Sparafucile cackling
among the damned to think what day that was.
And had no breakfast.
I didn't dare go home till after midnight.
And didn't dare go then.
And almost didn't, at least in the role
I was half sure I was playing.
For a coat and a sandwich, I'd have topped a trolley,
stolen a first ride into Sullivan Square,
and jumped whatever was heading into Boston
and out the other side.
Or so at least I told myself and what other part I was playing.
Knowing at curtain time, ma would be waiting.
Those days, she was no one to fool with.
Some damn cousin had worked a sheet of leather into a roll,
bound up one end, and cut the rest to cattails.
Ma kept it for tribal sessions.
This would be tribal.
Nor had I ever been closer to the tribe in my own mood.
I knew what was coming next.
I thought I did.
And thought I had outgrown it before it happens.
Let her play it hot.
I'd play it cold.
She was sitting in the kitchen like a stone Sibyl hissing.
The leather cat, it was my day for cattails,
on the table like a dried, familiar, dead but hissing
back.
I let her work me over till the welts bled through my shirt.
And wouldn't make a sound except to say, you having a good time.
It broke her fit.
She was the one to cry.
But everyone played his part in our asylum.
She dropped the cat and stood crying.
I picked it up and tossed it into the garbage.
And she kissed me.
And both of us knew it was my confirmation.
Yes, from Pagliacci or from Rigoletto.
And yet it was real enough.
And I was a man and frightened her.
Had it been Italy, she thought, she
might have watched me climb the mountain
as wrong men go to vengeance where they find it.
Wherever the madhouse rocks of history
spin out the numbers of whatever they are
and let a fool in the crumbs of what he has come through
to be taken.
She could see me dying with Carabinieri smoking out
the blood around the rock I leaped from.
It was that.
Guessing what mad histories she read me from
broke my own madness.
How could we ever meet?
I had escaped her.
Though she washed my back and oiled it.
Sobbing her first mood in reverse
and brought me soup and heated over spaghetti.
I had escaped her.
Would she escape me?
I'd sooner have lost the Iliad and The Odyssey
than the purity of her madness, which was
love in its own numbered cave.
I kissed her forehead, and told her to go to bed.
And she went to bed, radiant with my found manhood.
As if she'd dreamed I had killed the Carabinieri, gotten away,
gone off to sea, and the numbers of destiny
to lux great seven, and home in a Cadillac chauffeured
by a colonel of Bersaglieri.
I went to bed myself, almost believing I was a man
and had snapped ropes in two.
Though I have smelled the grease paint in my fraud.
The skin of my back was pulled too tight for wearing,
but I wasn't about to take off up a mountain that
wasn't there.
I had my moods to climb.
And had climbed out of them when I'd played them through,
till the next lunacy came from the casting office.
Meanwhile, at liberty, as unemployed hams
used to announce in Variety, meaning nowhere
with nothing to do about it but sit and think.
What had been done?
Who did what had been done?
It was so small a step from God that morning
and took me five more years to finish taking, sometimes
in real sweat, sometimes in real greasepaint,
and often enough in both.
But I had left the cave forever, even when I went back still
fingering a guilt like the dry scab of a cut someone
had given me.
As I left that cat of 20 tails in a day's garbage
curling the question marks on the chicken bones,
as if to ask, who chooses what we do?
I found one part of one answer five years later.
And took 30 more to learn there was not much more.
It was a June day.
I was home from school and curled up by my window reading
William James' on the Varieties of Religious Experience,
because a nice nelly neighbor, half a priest,
and home from the seminary had sermoned me,
when he met me coming from the library and saw it under
my arm.
Well, I'd met to read her or I wouldn't have taken it out.
But when he horned in, I decided to take notes
to needle with him and was working at that.
Besides, I was having a fling at being country gentleman.
Come Monday, I'd have to start another summer as gang
jackhammering for the Gas Co.
or for Di Piedro, who subcontracted for the Gas Co.
Sweat.
It always took two weeks on the damned hammer
before I could hold my breakfast until lunch.
And at night, I'd be hitting my bed too tired for supper.
Then in two seconds it would be 5:00 o'clock
and time to start again.
But this was Thursday.
And I was still a scholar.
Ma was outside.
My abdicated matriarch and my daughter
fussing her flowers to bridle by my window.
She was a witch of flowers and could
some of them out of the ground as if they lay full
blossomed and wrapped in mulch waiting for her to call.
Flowers were her light and gifted as her dark,
with tongues she knew and things did, but no other.
I heard her cooing incantations to them in the same rhythms
I would hear her hiss when she attacked
a dust sent to offend her.
It wasn't enough to scrub it from the floor.
She had to hate it out of the universe,
as she needed now to love her flowers to bloom.
I was taking a killing note on nitrous oxide--
that by the way, I'd tell him, is laughing gas--
and on what the stuff could do for seminarians who are running
short of mystical experiences--
[LAUGHTER]
--when I heard a step on the walk.
And then the nose you know which father talked through,
asking to know if I was home.
I didn't have to be told what local priestlet had gone
to mass that morning and stayed to discuss
my soul with what local knows.
We all came out being crazy our own way.
But ma got my soul's medal.
He's in the home, I heard her say,
defending me on my mountain.
It was as good as any laughing gas,
for lifting me to a vision.
I saw time stripped to Plotinus's and Teresa's bones
and built again to walls and terraces.
Up the whole mountain I had never
seen, out of whose caves my ax came looking for me,
like the dark and lighted numbers of a fate stocked
by Carabinieri, while the sibyl crouched in a thicket.
Hiss them to the bone edge and sent them
spinning with a bolt of hate.
A nose blew through my dream and blew it back.
And Father Ryan was pouring it in on ma
to think of her own soul and of the sin of letting her son be
rotted through by evil till he was
pitchfork screaming into hell to wail in the broth forever.
Ma didn't exactly catch all the words.
But she made out the tune.
If she was my daughter now, she was still
a fury to any wrong nose that twitched up the mountain.
I heard her scald 3,000 guardian years of a pure, mother,
Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin cave dialect.
You name the tongue that suffers birth.
And if it came out broken through a slapstick
turn of history, it was still sung from a peak
higher than all laughing gases.
You leave a my Johnny alone, you Irish a you, he's a good boy.
[LAUGHTER]
And I was the oaf at the window when
the flowered covenant of language split the holy truths.
I allow sublimates and wept whole fabliaux
for history's daughter.
Tall from her root of love, my comic source, my radiant
witch of first made lunacies and priestess of the tongues
before a man.
Ma, I whispered laughing through to prayer.
I thought you did not know me, nor I you.
But what we are is first milk and last candle
and indivisibly ahead of thought.
And I am no man till I am your son.
And close my great born five year step away
into the first love I identified my whole way back through time.
My first deed done back to the cave our madness happens from."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I'm afraid those poems make too much
of a demand on an audience.
I better shift to some shorter things for what time
we have left.