i.
Saint Paul, by Rembrandt van Rijn
You ask me why? Why smooth out his rough spots?
Why not show the flaws of the man entire?
I gave Paul another Gospel? I thought
the message mattered more. I think Empire
taken over from the inside—new King.
I think bold doesn’t have to be stupid,
think we’ve got a bell we’re going to ring
in different ways in different places. Cupid
knows: you pick a certain kind of arrow
for a certain kind of person. Same here.
God knows the way to the heart of a Pharaoh:
plagues for him, a breath for us—it came here
like the strike of a snake, wings of a dove
spread wide. All nothing…if we have not love.
ii.
And it’s all nothing if we have not love.
And these little pods of people gathered,
and this tentative peace we’re talking of,
and the way we say as if it mattered—
God became man…
Yes, we have made mistakes
and you deserve to be the first to know
that nothing’s happening here, no big break.
He is stuck in a little room in Rome
and the Emperor isn’t listening,
and the leaders of the synagogue came,
heard his piece, and they aren’t listening,
and we sit, pray and listen to the rain.
Maybe God’s playing us a little song?
Drip. Love. Drop. Love. Drip…or maybe we’re wrong.
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Thank you for this intelligent, beautifully crafted, and deeply moving poem.
Thank you, Marjorie! And reading this comment made me look back at a wonderful interview you did with Susan a few years ago. Grateful for your witness as poet in the world.
Both the poet himself, and the Luke he imagines himself into, are in a state evoked by Helen Vendler in her essay on John Ashbery:
“Something—which we could call ruminativeness, speculation, a humming commentary—is going on unnoticed in us always, and is the seedbed of creation: Keats called it a state of ‘dim dreams,’ full of ‘stirring shades, and baffled beams.’ We do not quite want to call these things ‘thoughts.’ They nonetheless go on. Do we have ideas about them? Well, yes, as Keats did when he thought of them as shadowy stirrings, perplexed shafts of light. Our ‘ideas’ about these ‘thoughts’ that are not thoughts are, as Keats said, the stuff of poetry before it is put into a neater mental order. Intuition, premonition, suspicion, and surmise are the characteristic forms of Ashbery’s expression. Otherwise, he would not be true to the stage of spiritual activity in which he is interested.” Helen Vendler, “The Magic of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 226.