the New Pantagruel

Four Poems

by David Wright

Contents

• Before You Read the Plaque About Turner’s “Slave Ship”
• Missionary Slides
• Pathetique (Four Movements)
• Four Ways to Read a Footnote

Before You Read the Plaque About Turner’s “Slave Ship”*

See the bare canvas.                     A pure white
            bone that                                     splits the sky’s
                weak, warm                                             skin of colors.

What will be left                             on the ocean floor,
What will be left                                         under the swells,
        What will be left                                                     is unspeakable
                and vivid                                             and not the vicious beauty
                of cracking masts                                         against the atmosphere
                writing lines of blood.                                             Not the blended light,
                or the curious gulls.                                                 Not the market’s
                fanacious hope.

                                                                     Not the gods’ desperation to include us in this disaster,
                                                                                without our will. But the bare, bright,
                                                                                           smoothed bones of many, many hands,

                                                                        so cold, down where the master
                                                                could not imagine,
                                                        could not light
                                            the darkest depths.

*J. M. W. Turner, British, 1775-1851
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)
Oil on canvas (35 3/4 x 48 1/4 in.)

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Missionary Slides

The Amazon spreads, grows lush
with foreign green across a screen
at the front of the Baptist sanctuary.
Near a leaf as large as her torso,
a native woman nearly smiles.
The missionary wife pronounces
this naked woman’s name, tells us
how she came to love Jesus. Across
the convert’s bare breasts, the missionary
husband has drawn black bars, then censored
the space below her waist. The slide changes.
They tell us also the names of flowers:
one appears as a gathering of white and pink
tongues, lunging toward the light, the next
a multitude of interlaced blossoms, yellow
and cupped towards us, a congregation
of offering hands. I recall none of the names.

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Pathetique (Four Movements)

(after John Ruskin)

1.

No angry clouds.
Do not invoke a cruel wind.
Must not suggest a universe that cares.
Lear, of course, you cannot read.
No one more pathetic than Lear.
Forget Odysseus blaming the sea.
Coleridge’s dancing red leaf
does not dance. The crocus
holds no gold cup, just saffron petals,
and they neither say nor invite.
Not to mention (and you must not)
Jesus calming a storm, filling nets,
killing fig trees, suggesting stones
can sing. These objects mean,
like empty cups. Only what you fill
them with, like your mouth,
which also is natural, but yours.
So, being human, you may attribute
all you like to your flesh and bone hinge.
If you need this: watch Dante’s mouth.
It never confuses a leaf for a soul.

2.

Not to tell the difference between souls
who dance their way from Acheron like leaves,
and pairs of plain red leaves. A crocus holds
no gold cups to fill. Saffron petals weave
nothing but themselves. An empty blue bowl
has the power to be blue, regardless.
Clouds do not grow angry. Cruel winds blow
on no one particular. The heartless
night has no heart. Gunpowder also
dislikes no one. The match, also, means
nothing personal. Strike and strike the cold
world hard, with confidence. If it explodes
we’ll cower at the blue flash. In your serene
center, the grace of a few pure facts preserves
you within the devastating, instant furnace.

3.

Being what survives as flesh, you will attribute.
That too will not save you, though you may feel
As though birdsong, a wave’s crest are for you.

4.

Make a line from pure air.
Draw a bow across taut strings,
or strike the key and hammer.
What if sound were pigment?
What if you spread it thin
on canvas? No. We’d think,
then, of how orange appears,
texture, grain, and scale
to trail like a sun across skies,
or how wide the brush must be
to trace a hand curled against a hand.
Better to sing, to break the throat’s
catch. Abstraction needs
a body, like a virus, or a lover.
Invite beauty and worry inside.
They will be a shade on your lips.
The ghost of an actual word
will haunt your tongue.
The bird, the cup, the match.
None of them give a fig.
They do not have, like you,
a tongue.

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Four Ways to Read a Footnote*

1

Ignore the naked women.
        They expose themselves because of a preacher.
        They run swiftly and straight into heaven.

Ignore the naked men.
        They are not drunk.
        They are not insane.

Ignore them all in favor of God.
        Whose just vengeance dazzles the reprobate.
        Whose splendor either finds or evades the inward feeling of the heart. *

Ignore the seven severed heads.
Ignore two sets of lungs filled with water, then blood.

Hear instead what makes a martyr feel at home
        when in foreign parts she unexpectedly hears others speak her own language.*

2

Hendrick Hendrichz Snyder’s Tanka

Kingdom came.
I said, “Here it is.”
Our clothes burned.
Who can say just why
People lose their heads.*

3

“We should know that in sin a hostile power turns itself against us; that back of this power lurks the planning spirit of Satan, who stealthily presses upon us and aims to kill the soul.” –Abraham Kuyper*

Let me tell you my plan said Hendrichz.
Everyone must either write a dissertation
or strip themselves bare, burn their best
and warmest clothes, and run right into the hands
of the magistrates, who are of course God’s hands
on earth. They may ask why you run. Tell them:
Snyder has seen the apocalypse.

I persevered and stealthily wrote my thesis
while seven brothers and two sisters chose
the better way.

4

At the bottom of the page lies the truth,
the story under the arc: naked zeal
and the vital smell of their burning clothes
propelled the martyrs into the streets. Feel
Amersterdam’s February chill their soles,
their bums, their ten bodies breathing out mist
while their unsure, elected, elated souls
cry, “Woe! Woe! God’s vengeance burns like this,
like the bitter Dutch air!” Envision
how vivid God must have seemed, or how hell
appeared across the wooden bridge, heaven
stretched past the Oude Kirke, the Amstel.
Can a footnote wound us like a dull blade,
bury us in graves where history’s made?*

1. This footnote appears in Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953): The devotees named above, 7 men and 3 women, were holding a nocturnal meeting, in February, 1535, in Amsterdam, when their leader, Hendrick Hendrichz Snyder, cast his clothes into the fire, and commanded his followers to do likewise. At his behest they followed him, running through the streets and crying, “Woe, woe, woe; the vengeance of God, the vengeance of God.” They were soon captured. The men were beheaded, the women drowned, except one who escaped. Snyder claimed he had seen heaven, hell, and God, and that the judgment day was at hand. (31) Back to poem.

2. A quote from Abraham Kuyper, lifted from a very reputable web page. Back to poem.

3. A quote from John Calvin. Back to poem.

4. Not an actual tanka, not Snyder’s actual words. Back to poem.

5. Another quote from Kuyper, same web page. Back to poem.

6. An anachronistic couplet. Back to poem.

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