On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems

Ode on Satan’s Power

96 Ode on Satan’s Power At a local bistro’s Christmas sing-along, the new age pianist leads us in a pan-cultural brew of seasonal songs, the Ramadan chant being my personal favorite, though the Kwanza lullaby and Hanukkah round are very interesting. Let’s face it, most of us are there for the carols we set to memory in childhood though some lyrics have been changed, so when we sing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” we’re transformed into a roomful of slightly tipsy middle-class gentlepeople who are longing to be saved from hopelessness instead of Satan’s power when we were gone astray, but I, for one, sing out Satan’s power as do most of the gentlepeople, women and men, something I find myself pondering a few days later, while my profoundly worried nephew, Henry, and I embark on our annual blitzkrieg of baking, punctuated by Henry’s high speed philosophical questioning, such as, Where do we go when we die? Pressing my collection of cookie cutters—trees, snowflakes, Santas—into fragrant ginger dough, I want to say, Who cares? Carpe diem, buster, though, of course, I’m way too scarred by pop psychology to utter half the nutty things that pop up like weeds in the 18th-century garden of my brain. Eightyear -olds need their questions answered, I suppose, but not by me. “Let’s watch some TV,” I say, an instrument of Satan if ever there was one. Bullitt’s on—Steve McQueen in his prime. I love this movie—equal waves 97 of sorrow and carnage washed up on a hokey latesixties beach of masculine cool. McQueen is Bullitt, and Jacqueline Bisset’s his girl. Henry and I start watching during the scene where she is driving Bullitt around because, if I remember correctly, he’s totaled not just one but several cars, in at least as many now-famous chases. Jackie drops Bullitt at a hotel, where he finds a girl, newly dead, throat circled with purple fingerprints like grape jam stains. “What happened to her?” Henry asks, frowning. I think, Oh, shit, this is not an officially approved nephew-aunt Christmas activity. If I don’t make a big deal of it, maybe he won’t tell his mother. “Someone strangled her,” I say. “What’s strangled?” he asks, and I see my sister has chosen not to threaten her child as our own dear mother routinely threatened us. Driven crazy, she browbeat us with strangulation, being slapped silly, public humiliation, murder, and eternal damnation. Perhaps because Henry’s her only child, my sister can afford to be gentler with her son, or maybe it’s because two months before he was born she almost lost him, ending up in the hospital, hooked to machines, ordered to bed for the final wrenching weeks. Maybe that’s why the story of the Christ child speaks to us. All parents wonder how the world will treat their tender babes. Like Lorca, will he become a great poet, then end up in a mass grave? Only German philosophers think more about death than Henry Gwynn. 98 “Why did he strangle her?” he asks, face formidable as Hegel’s. Satan’s power, I want to scream, but mumble “It’s just a movie; it’s not real.” Steve McQueen’s dodging a plane, and I remember reading he did his own stunts, which I tell Henry, but he’s still in that hotel room. “If she was alive, how’d she get her eyes to roll back into her head?” I’m thinking of pornography, snuff movies, all the things I never want him to see or even know about in this tawdry world. “Honey, it’s a major motion picture. Even in a small part an actress has to be great.” He nods and takes a bite off Santa’s head. “She was a pretty good actress.” You bet your booty, and I realize out of the blue Santa is an anagram for Satan. No way am I going to explain anagrams or Herr Satan, though how wonderful to have such a nemesis— a fallen archangel, one of high heaven’s brightest stars— in a battle with Jehovah for our souls, rather than the calendar’s increasing speed like a roller coaster run amok through a fun park of lost dreams, lost landscapes, and children, growing up faster than...