There's a wonderful anthropologist
who works at Santa Cruz now, and who
did as one must do her field work in one
of the classic sites abroad and published her first book
and got tenure, and then changed her field work to the American
South and the sites of fundamentalist religious
practice in America.
And it was from Susan that I was first
prompted to contemplate the difference
between the solid oak pulpit that traditional revivalist
preachers use and the newer transparent plexiglas
pulpits used by some of the television charismatics.
And I thought that was exceedingly interesting
and it came back to me at a crucial moment.
This poem is called, "Good News" and it's
written in two sections.
One, the hobbled, the halt, the hasten-to-blame-it-on childhood
crowd, the undermined and over-their-heads, the hapless,
the humbugs, the hassle-me-nots.
The night-- before the night my uncle Jens saw Jesus standing
in the hayloft, he--
my uncle Jens, that is considered
cashing the whole thing in.
Bettina gone the way she had, the boys all gone to hell--
the mild, flat light of evening lay like a balm on the fields.
But for his heart no balm in sight.
So Jens gave all his money to the local charismatic,
and in exchange, his fellow faithful
told him to forgive himself.
God's god-forsaken children all over the suburbs
and the countryside are dying in the service of a market share.
Witness the redhead I used to go to college with,
who played the trombone and studied Kant
and now performs the laying on of hands
somewhere in eastern Tennessee.
Beneath her touch quench sight returns,
the myelin sheath repairs and lets the wheelchair rust,
the cancerous cat comes purring back to health.
But Jens, whose otherworldliness imperfectly cohered,
took to driving his pickup off the road,
in desultory fashion for the most part
so that cousin Ollie's cornfield took the brunt of harm.
The hens ran loose.
And Jens, who in his mother's arms had leapt for joy
and in tow-headed youth had leapt to favor in each tender
heart, went weary to salvation.
Two, having learned from a well-meaning neighbor
that death will not have her if Jesus does first,
My three-year-old daughter is scouring
the visible world for a sign.
The other she's found in abundance--
death on her dinnerplate, death in the grass--
and drawing just conclusions is beside herself with fear.
"Most Englishmen," the Archbishop said smoothly,
"are still residual Christians.
We still need a clergy for funerals."
The televangelists plexiglas pulpit,
the crystal veil of his tears, assure us
the soul is transparent too.
No stone can break nor scandal mar the radiant
flow of video conversion.
Close now, closer than audio enhancement,
the frictionless story that washes us clean.
Words disencumbered of contingency, of history,
of doubt.
God's wounds, they swore, the old ones, the believers,
as now we swear by sex or shit.
God's wounds, which failures of attention made."
That's what zunes is, you know, what sort of people
goofing around and at one another with swords
or doing their swearing by God's name.