The Church in the Plains, and: Glossolalia

THE CHURCH IN THE PLAINS

Seeing it is nearly nine miles to the church in The Settlement,    they entreat the Father to dwell        first in the rafters            of the one-room school house,    later in the rough-hewn belfry        of the new white church.

There, they gather to thank God in the familial tongue    for aquifer and loam, for infant Söhne who will farm        these lands not yet ancestral,    for Magdalena and Mathilde, wives who steam        fresh snow in their kettles            when the pumps freeze.

They ask for Sunday evenings    that burst slow and easy as the bubbles        in their warm brown beer.

There, they gather until letters from the old country    cease amid news of war, and the final echoes        of boot-clomp Deutsch            dissipate over the plains,until the last boat lists in the celestial estuary,            its passengers old women reluctant        to shed the body’s unseemliness,        its dry rot and insidious fever,    old women reluctant to leave off        their habitual shooing            of the Angel of Death.

They gather until the old women depart,    the church beneath them seeping        a new-country light,

they gather until the grandmothers are gone,        diese Großmütter who cannot learn        to pray in a new tongue.

GLOSSOLALIA

My mother warned me against this,    the tongue that parses thighs,        but I imagined some lucent night flower    or else a gladiolus trembling, mistlisting over the cornfields.

Already, I have bedded more men than she,    her hands now mother-hands,        the same that lavedmy child-pocked back,        the bath curdy with oatmeal.

This I know, the devil rides by the creekat night. I have seen him there with the Mennonite boys.        You who are like them but not,    you who scald instead of glower, teach me to catchthe Spirit as it vees up like an owl.

You who quote my mother’s scriptures,    pour them over my head until the words blur,kneel with me in the water and let me wash you,    listen to the devil laugh, the sound tearing        like claws through hymns.

This I know, if you keep me thrashing,he cannot touch me.