The next poem is the same person.
She's had that experience where she almost died and has decided
to go to a faith healer.
It's a little bit livelier kind of a poem
because she's no longer--
It's not-- The crisis has passed.
The reason I think I wanted to write this poem,
which I actually wrote before the last one,
is that I'm very interested in religion in America
and the various aberrations and strange forms religion takes.
I think a lot of Americans have lost their orthodox religion,
I know I did.
And therefore they we begin to turn
to other strange forms of worship
and out of a need to believe in something other than mortality.
I think that explains a lot of people like Jim and Tammy
Bakker.
And I was fascinated with them for years.
Before the whole scandal broke, I
used to watch them with sort of a grotesque fascination,
they were so horribly fascinating.
And the faith healer in this poem
is not quite so nefarious and grotesque.
He's actually kind of a mensch.
He's kind of a good guy who really wants to help people.
Another interest that I think comes through in the poem
is my interest in the forms that classicism takes in America.
I call this book Palladium and that was one of the reasons
why, it's a reference from the Greek Palladium.
And one thing I'm really interested in
as I look around America and the landscape
are aspects like where I live in the Midwest
and on the East Coast too.
I don't know about here, probably not.
But there are houses that are ranch houses
and very, very plain, as and they'll have little columns
all the way across the front of the house
is a sort of a gesture toward those classical Doric columns.
But a real aberration, a real Americanization of classicism,
and things too like linoleum that
looks like marble, and even the classical forms
like the golden arches, these beautiful spherical forms
and what we've made of them in this country.
And I think what got me started thinking about this was that I
grew up in Troy, New York.
And having-- upstate New York has all these classical name
places like Ithaca, and Syracuse, and Troy.
And of course, the cities are these places
that are anything but grand.
These old post-industrial cities and the difference
between the place where I grew up,
which was quite impoverished, and depressed,
and the idea that it once wanted to be Troy, the grandeur that
was Greece.
That was sort of touching to me.
So I think some of that is behind this poem, which
is an awfully long introduction, but it's a rather long poem.
It's called The Body Opulent.
And the title refers to the woman's body,
but the body opulent is also America.
Mr. Silver owned a steel plant and manipulated auras
on the outskirts of Detroit.
A faith healer.
Perhaps he could heal mine.
Through subdivisions trim and brown as bouillon cubes,
a defoliate zone where heavy machinery depreciated,
I took my heart.
The waiting room contained a cloudy sky made finite
in linoleum, a kind of American marble.
Whatever lured me here?
Well a month ago, I plunged into a double dark nothing
like sleep, since sleep gives dividends
of dream and free wake ups. Coming to my body
less tractable than a grocery bag of sand,
I knew I'd nearly made the one stop shopping
trip I'd heard so much about.
Doctors pursued the elusive verdict, their spooky machines
awhir with purpose.
Their glowing dyes showed fiery tributaries riveting my heart.
Arabesques of argon violet crosshatched in patterns,
so complex they seemed quite random.
It would take some faith to unravel all that bafflement.
Was it heretical to expect things from this world,
to want to live forever in the cells' jewel glut, the body
opulent, a squirming heaven in each fist?
Well, Mr. Silver spoke first of psychics
with the power to bend metal, supernormally light lamps two
miles away, draw like famous artists
and speed the growth of seeds.
Though he could do none of these,
I sensed a Yankee optimism when he mentioned his ability
to diagnose and treat disease.
Never mind preachers finding devils under everybody's skin.
Some things are beyond our knowing.
It's important to believe, he said.
When I agreed, he seemed relieved.
All right, sports fans, let's see if these success stories go
beyond conjecture, he said.
I was to close my eyes and meditate on something pleasant
while he mediated over me.
And though I tried to snag my mind on sweetness,
I kept thinking: this is America,
and I hadn't told anybody where I was going.
He put his hands around my neck and squeezed.
Each cell got busy singing the dawn song of its name.
My body suddenly felt worth its weight in light.
As if I held the sky above an earthquake,
the magenta glow made by electric fields
and shifting plates inside each artery and vein.
After 30 minutes, he backed off to give the news.
It's true, you have a cardiac screw loose,
but I'll tell you what to do, smile,
meditate like you did tonight.
Remember, you don't have to kiss anybody's fanny.
You're going to be all right.
By way of farewell, blessing, or epiphany,
he feelingly recited Kipling's "If."
Then his flashlight led me through a maze
of cold rolled metal, polychromed partitions.
Outside the night was laced with bright fillips
of pidgin English.
Glass benders and bins among transformers, standing burners,
the din and smell of lightning formed these lifesavers
and double helices of neon, an old fashioned, hard to stack,
quickly cracking stuff.
They vacuumed each tube of impurities priming the inside
with hot colored phosphor, painted
the spaces between letters black.
And they burned themselves, welding adrenaline messages
into night: "La Chambre Exotic Dancers," "Warsaw Foot-Long."
"Elijah's Hellenic Den" looked the most respectable.
When I opened the door, a waiter raised a platter of flames.
Opa, the patrons roared as if their lungs were made
of silk wrapped round a shout.
Still hoping for signs and wonders,
I thought it might mean health or life, an omen of survival.
It's just something we say, means like ole.
Don't mean nothing, the waiter told me.
The appetizers were dark and shiny,
the wine local from grapes grown in the Motor City,
going by its nose of Pennzoil and Prestone.
A dubious sustenance, yet I swallowed it
like gospel that somehow did me good.
I was lucky then under the enormous talk of Midwest sky
to find my Nova in the lot, to drive past emblems galvanizing
night, the golden arches, spirals, labyrinths and flags,
the halos placed like logos above service stations--
Mobil, Gulf and Shell, the freeway's glowing dot and dash,
a path of crumbs to follow home.