“Concerning Ceremonies, 
                                                                           why some
be abolished and some retained”: that gold-embossed
Book of Common Prayer (1823) still bears
the scar on the back page where I stabbed
it with a pencil, at age seven, to punish
a sacred I didn’t know.
                                                                           Desecration
should invite a response, but I
would live in silence
in my little revolution and “mischievous purposes”
(as the editors put it) “during the late unhappy confusions,”
having stabbed, it appears, only myself.

*

And so we built a temple, my brother and I.
We dug it into the sandstone bluff at the edge
of the beach, that summer in France.
We thought there should be gifts: we brought
whelk shells, blue sea glass, daisies
drying in a jar. We thought
there should be a god: we carved
a deity, six inches tall, from driftwood
and painted him yellow with a cobalt blue loincloth.
We thought he should have
his own book: we wrote
it in India ink, illuminating in watercolor
his rules, our devotions,
which I no longer remember. 
                                                       We had
no brass candlestick, no shittim wood, no incense; we soon
turned to other games.
My brother found, in the woods, a German helmet
with a bullet hole blistered through the temple.
And I, walking home from the beach one afternoon,
looked up and saw, where the sky had been,
an absolute blank. And that, too,
was an instruction.

*

To live in a story? What story?

*

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit—” Mine
wasn’t broken. But maimed.
College days. I didn’t know
why I no longer ate. I read
books, but the words bled out. I sleep-walked
between classes. The austere doctor, 
a Freudian, listened
while I heard myself telling lies
I knew were lies as soon as they flew from my lips. 
                                                  He
said nothing.             

     There are many dead ends.

My heart was not contrite.

“We used to call this melancholia,” my mother said
coldly.

                     But at winter break, having left
school and the silent doctor and silent books,
I skied alone down the sweep of pasture in the neighbor’s farm,
snow-crust cackling under my skis, the dim
elderly mountains crouching around the horizon—

and there, splayed on a barbed wire fence
against that waste of snow,
hung an immense
white, crucified owl. Frozen

where he’d cruised into the wire. His wings
arced like a magician’s cape
over the arcanum. He glared
out of his death. I looked
into the pitiless eyes of a being who was
exactly who he was.

*
                               And I don’t even like Rubens. So why
the ambush? Yes, the flashy brushwork, and who knew more
about the mystery of flesh? But
all those buttocks and bellies, rosacea-
riddled and swollen, the sumptuous folds
of silk, damask, and fur: yet 
his Entombment stopped me cold.
White and verdigris, this sagging corpse. And dead
center, where the diagonals cross,
the wound in the ribs. The slit.
Pale blood slithered out. Like
an envelope torn open, that small gash.

                                     I think
geometry is the secret—the cut at the heart
of the canvas, the heart of the room, the heart
of—
           what we can’t say.

And blood trickled, too, out of the tilted nostrils.

*

Where is the story?
The story is hidden.
And there are many stories.

Was the letter delivered?
Delivered. But illegible.

*

“Why some be abolished, and some retained.” I,
old now, retain
this savage rite:
                                    once in a blue moon
to stand heretically at an altar

                                    and receive

on my tongue the sliver of a broken god.

This poem was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.