THAT IS TO SAY: In memory of Nathan A. Scott, Jr.

126 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE THAT IS TO SAY In memory of Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Fall, and the terraced ascensions of this Lawn Buzz with the callow treasons of its clerks, And along the colonnade The sun makes a gnomon of each column and brick Where light waves congregate astride their opposite On every wire-edge of shade. From above, the Rotunda's unblinking eye Looks up, looks back as though from where it came, Some archetype or figure, And not a built thing imagined into presence By faulty human genius on the backs of slavesA wound that would nurse its cure. From higher still, let's say a satellite map, With every turning threshold of range and scope The center grows center-less, An assemblage of "dreamy anonymity:' Strangely depthless, a flat and fracturing collage Of small lives moving en masse Like passing circuits across a motherboard No matter their ambitions or pains, no matter But matter animated Bywhat you called the frailest "fragments of adjustment" Our idea of the world a frontier in extremis, Derelict, desolate, Which is to say,as you would say,what you saw As a fall and a forgetting, a banal eclipse That leaves us in the meantime, An erased horizon, and earth unchained from its sun. What good, then, apropos of nothing, to savor The fine meal, the martini, THE LEGACY OF REV. NATHAN A. SCOTT, JR. 127 The chatty communion of friends at home, The calling of others to learn otherwise? I only want you to see, The great saint wrote, which was the creed you lived by And what you taught, a way of making poetry A way ofletting-be, Until the part could somehow cicatrize the whole, The cheap synecdoche like an empty sequined glove Become a bright beholding. As in Bearden's The Return ofthe Prodigal Son Where the one who's come back looks stanched in gauze, Humbled, raw, his enfolding Waiting in the advent of those who greet him, Themselves radiantly particulate With scraps, bits-surfaces The artist improvised on this kaleidoscopic frame, Where the one who's escaped the sty's stench and mire Turns outward from the faces Ofthose who will embrace him, of those he will embrace, Toward us as toward a lens, his chest shining With its breastplate of shook foil, The cast-offbottle that bound him secured in rope, His two horizons behind-the ashen and the risenAnd that candle at the fulcrum Under the figure's wide, iconic eye, burning As in a tabernacle, so you would have us see Each such meeting together As a ritual of color, depth of field, the promise Of an imminent All-in-All that flashes instantly In every instant's shutter. 128 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE That is to say, as you would say, everything Is threshold, and is so by way of being Providently on the way, Itself and not another thing, and so the advent Of a coming home: It is the slug's slim prayer That teaches how to pray, Riding its losses across a patch ofground, Till one believes with each leaving in the kinship Of things that do not look akin, The circle squared in a turn ofthe scope. That is to say, We are gathered wherever we go by way oflove, And nothing will be forsaken. DANIEL TOBIN Emerson College ...