Pilgrim’s Gait. David Craig
both caught colds.
The Santa Fe Staircase (Tour)
Next to a large diocesan bookstore
grab, a decommissioned Loretto;
you couldn’t walk up the tight circular—
car vibrations! (Everything truly good
gets lost: the depth, prayer which sustains.)
Thirty-three steps, a novena’s answer
to bad carpentry!
I try to picture St. Joseph in a saddle.
Eastwood’s cigar, Mexican poncho, a level
in his holster. He bent the wood in water,
just down the road from Georgia O’Keefe’s museum.
I went to see a nearby church with holy dirt:
El Santuario de Chimayo. (Humble locals
were worried about its lean, as we waited—
like one must, it seems, at every site.)
A small room contained a round pit,
the “holy dirt,” adjacent Prayer Room
with photos, all the crutches you could use.
People ate the soil, back when they had no shame,
nothing to lose.
Theirs are the crutches!
I took some home in a vial.
The cliff dwellings nearby were different:
ruins of pueblos. Ladders and drawings,
worn stone steps. God dancing, as He always does,
in feathers, in the past—It’s where we see Him best.
How sweet and dry the American West is:
blue sky, scrubbing brush, canyons,
the smooth run of car wheels.
Fake Apparition
—in Carrollton, OH
The theologian’s old Victorian sunroom
windows—stack of locutions on the sill.
Having been appointed by the Bishop,
he just shook his head.
We went out to play hoops with his kids:
side yard, cracked asphalt, full court.
He’d built a monastery, because a change
is coming: huge dormitories, beautiful church—
Mark’s ark, I kidded him, still empty
for the most part, just a few religious
in a new order. But the gesture!
It was rich: like our lives, what we hope to fill—
Francis’s fools!
Do it again! Do it again!
Let our hearts be the flagstone
everyone walks on!
As a young family, ours used to follow his
around Hopedale’s Sacred Heart Church,
Eucharistic procession. Absurd Catholics,
dressing up the present in banners, deacon’s garb,
as if we know what gives it expression!
How many heroes we’ve known!
Bounce the ball, young one.
Bounce the ball.
The Madonna’s House
1.
Within the week I was on a muzzled Greyhound, heading into the Great White North—Canady. Destination: Moose Jaw, Ontario. I waved good-bye to my All-American college life, hugs for everyone. Both Israel and Periwinkle wished me happy trails. She patted me on the back, congratulated me for having escaped the blight of intellectualism and suburbia; Israel suggesting that, when in a squeeze, running away is certainly an option. Then he grinned, shook my hand, told me to keep a record.
And there I was, on a bus, duffel bag stuffed with clothes and books, bad money, playing out my options in my head. How, I wondered, was I going to convince these people that I was in earnest about their religion without sounding like the complete phony I was. Maybe some choked reticence? A kind of constant, tacit, respectably distant fawn? The Gollum slither? I was good at that. Maybe just keep my mouth shut for a change. Now that would be a miracle. Besides, who knew, maybe I might even find Anita Bryant in the process.
But there was more to it than flight, I had to admit that to myself as well. This whole God bidness—evangelical Okie t.v., the money tree. I wanted to check it out, had for awhile. I’d read the GITA, some Rilke, had even spent time arguing with Jesus people at the university.
If there was something there, I wanted to know.
(Six degrees of suck was no way to go through life.)
I looked for the Falls when we got to Buffalo, never saw them. It was funny, I had always complained about America. But now that I was leaving my Bizarro-world home, I had mixed feelings. Would I be back? I thought back to the Ohio, brown enough to walk across. Still, it could sparkle sometimes in the afternoon sun, and when spring came, there was this nice light green that worked its way up the surrounding, polluted hills. I remembered all the rednecks at CJ’s, Linden’s as well, nobody at either place giving a damn about anything except what they had going on in front of them.
That was bully America, but if it walked loudly, carried a big stick, it was a blindness I at least felt comfortable with. This Canada thing would be a whole different slot machine.
I didn’t have too much trouble at the border, wore all new clothes, creases to facilitate my crossing: some new Levis, a lumberjack shirt, a pair of light leather work boots. I even sported a haircut. I tried to keep things light and moving by talking retreat to the guard in front of me, a month long exercise, I told him, in deep breathing. Slowing down, that’s where it was at. I jabbered away, told him I was taking a month off from my job, advised him to stash every penny of his retirement fund into the stock market. Keep talking, I said to myself as he had me begin to unload my bag.
More shirts, brand new heavy socks, thermal shorts. All of it, just out of the wrapper, two dress shirts with pins still in them. Was it all too much, I wondered? Apparently not, because he let me through. Maybe he just got tired of hearing my impersonation. Whatever, I decided. Things could have gotten difficult had we worked our way down to the dour roll of bills.
“Have a nice day, EH?” I said with a wink.
He waved me on, smiling at the cliché. “Take off.”
Toronto was cleaner than I thought possible for a big city. The guard rails on the sides of the interprovince coming in were not banged up; there was no flying debris, no dust working the support posts, no overgrown weeds along the sides of the highways either. And yet the place didn’t have the Puritan feel of America. What made these boys tick, I wondered? I had never been to Britain, so I couldn’t really see how much of an effect it had. “Keep Britain tidy,” I guessed that worked here as well.
And what exactly was a Commonwealth I wondered? A loose confederacy of nations. Share a queen. (Another “Bloody” Elizabeth, every queen since the renaissance, in some way, virgin?) The whole thing struck me as being slightly