Conception Abbey: Nodaway Co., Mo.

terror’s gland  unlocksthe prairie, karstviewedin Hebrew,  say a smalltownhovers, vaporous  observethe fresh canvasevery timeautumn exhales—  night’scloisteredferraments draw  more closelyto the wound’sdecision-whorl,  genetics’Passion repletein pidgin-amnesty,  the horsestartles brieflyon the cold, highgem of its  pasture,prismaticfear of God’sinvisible banquet  into which we are per-mitted to vanish—

© G.C. Waldrep

First, background: Conception Abbey is a real place, a Benedictine foundation dating from 1873; I saw it only once, from a distance, in passing, in 1991 or 1992. It resurfaced in my mind recently, again at a distance, again in passing. The “town” in question is Conception Junction, now all but a ghost town. Its nearby sibling is Skidmore, Mo., known for the bloody main-street broad-daylight extrajudicial execution of a local tough (for which no one was ever prosecuted) in 1981. Hence terror, though terror can also be associated with the act of coming into the presence of God.

None of these things—except the last—has anything to do with me. They brushed by me once, because the mother of my best friend in college was from Burlington Junction, Mo.

Murder is an ancient thing. Faith in and terror in the presence of a holy God are also ancient things—even more ancient, by the Genesis account. The Benedictines are slightly less ancient.

Poetic practice permits many things. Perhaps the most useful is the ability to process multiple planes of thought, emotion, and experience either simultaneously or in proximate sequence. Poems are, in this sense, extradimensional; they have too many sides, they burst their containers. In this, as in other ways (for instance, the insistence on metaphorical logic while at the same time the irreducible fact of their materiality), they relate to the parables that Jesus favored: sprung mechanisms, multivalent, signifying if not endlessly then at least at complex depths.

So, the memory of the abbey in the distance—but also, in the foreground, the single horse, doing nothing much on its scrap of pasture. Contingent upon these nodes: Hebrew, somewhere. Terror, somewhere (perhaps somewhere else, perhaps not). And of course many other beings and things. James Wright, with his own memories and poems of horses in pastures, his own terror.

There is this problem with the animals, in Christian thought. (St. Birgitta of Sweden becomes particularly, even delightfully, derailed whenever she considers this. Hildegard too.) Typically they appear only in the nativity creche, and in certain Celtic and medieval fables. In the nativity creche, they are the background; the manger, with the infant Christ, is the foreground. But that is not how most of us experience Christ, day by day, moment by moment. He can seem distant, an architecture—an inhabited and inhabiting architecture, to be sure, but—somewhere over there. The material is usually the foreground, at least as perceived by the material, that is the body.

A city on a hill cannot be hidden, but it can be driven past. Beasts graze its outskirts.

In terms of poetic form, there is this idea of the lyric fragment as “postmodern sentimentality,” a weak transposition of the nostalgia with which we regard the maimed texts that come down to us from antiquity. And this may be true, to a certain extent. But there is also, I think, a sense of the fragment as participatory, that is, a ragged form that invites the reader to participate by claiming the ground beyond the fragment or among fragments, the interstices. Edmond Jabès writes (in Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation), “Only in fragments can we read the immeasurable totality. Hence it is with reference to a fabricated totality that we tackle a fragment, which always represents the accepted, traditional part of the totality, yet at the same time renews its challenge of the beginning and, taking its place, becomes the beginning of all possible beginnings that can be brought to light.”

One may refer to Christ’s admonition to Peter that it was sufficient to wash his feet alone. Or to the...