To a Christian
Episcopal, that church I visited at first
was awfully goddamn subtle, let me tell you,
all its miracles resigned to metaphor, its marvels made
off-white (on which the best suspended X
was intellectual, its wire imaginary and its matter gray;
it didn’t have a serif to its name, and no
man dying, either). I was more
attracted, therefore, to
the Catholic Church, that good
stiff wallop of the bodily when you walk in,
a cool sepulchral stone, cold sweat. At least there seemed
some substance to the ideogram, some body to the love.
Red mud and wrap of wind, weren’t we
what happened after Mars and Venus mated?
All the alcoves harbored
statuary saints. In one, a well-fed mother
held a baby God, above a big blue world.
She sat there on a solid cloud, not quite
alone — mirabile dictu, a dog
of similar proportions there beyond the world
was carrying a torch at the tip of her foot, a foot
from North America. I put
a candle on the North Pole, which was up.
I lit one in Saint Rose’s alcove, too, because
you loved the zone of roses, loved
the swollen feeling, risen reds,
a kind of carnal fever that
undid you, rotting what
was rich. You loved
in point of fact two men:
one offered cool eternal life, the other
death, but with a kiss. So help me God,
as I’m alive, I can’t tell which is which.
- Heather McHugh
Hinge and Sign
4 Comments
March 27, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Another great one.
March 27, 2008 at 10:30 pm
i’m glad you like it. it’s always haunted me.
March 30, 2008 at 5:00 am
Dear Laura,
nothing personal, (because you didn’t write it), but the poem fails. It’s polemical. Beautiful, I suppose. But it’s beauty is terribly and irreconcilably marred by its premise: The Catholic Church is better than the Episcopal Church. And after that fact is revealed, everything else sounds sappy and stereotypically Romish, with all the arrogance that goes with it. I’m glad the poet found her Body of Christ, I really am. But she should probably stick to praising her church without making comparisons to an other. This isn’t poetry. It’s aesthetic apologetics. And it’s what gets me angry about the RC/Episcopal question (as much as I love both churches).
Lucas
P.S. “To A Christian” should probably be renamed “To a self-satisfied Roman Catholic.”
March 31, 2008 at 12:51 pm
hi lucas – i love this poem because, in the end, i think the poem is less about religion and more about physicality, friendship, and the similar powers of sex & religion. also, as far as i know, it’s written by a poet who has no religious faith, and whose narrator, in this poem, appears to share her sentiments.
when the poem begins to discuss the narrator’s friend (”you loved the zone of roses/loved the swollen feeling,/risen reds) who, according to the final few lines, may be a Catholic believer (”You loved//in point of fact two men:/ one offered cool eternal life, the other/ death, but with a kiss.”), i think the poem turns.
in my read, it’s no longer about religion; it’s about frailty, even (and esp?) in the life of someone who believes in God. according to the narrator, this perhaps-believing friend is obsessed with “a kind of carnal fever that/undid you, rotting what was rich”. the friend may not even understand what i think the narrator understands in the final lines: the friend’s love of carnal rot may ultimately undermine the friend’s faith.
i put this poem up less because it’s religious and more because it correspondeds to what i’m watching in the life of a friend right now — not to say that i see all and i can pass judgment, but, eerily, the poem fits. it was more of an emotive post, for me, and less of a devotional one.
thanks so much for engaging!!
love, l