"This Is Paradise": Michael McFee's Poems About Heaven

FEATURED AUTHOR—MICHAEL McFEE "This Is Paradise": Michael McFee's Poems About Heaven_________________ Robert M. West Michael McFee is very much a poet of this world. He has published scores of poems about photographs, everyday objects, the human body, his parents' lives, and the events ofhis ownlife; not forhim the anguished metaphysical contortions of a Charles Wright or a Mark Jarman. Yet on several memorable occasions this "earthly" poet has written about the unearthliest, most metaphysical of locales: heaven. He has done so for various, sometimes contradictory, purposes, but the inconsistencies should trouble no one: he is not a theologian working out a system, but a poet writing individual poems in which heaven has served, one way or another, as a useful topos. What these poems most have in common is an admirable degree of wit and, more pointedly, a tendency to call our attention back to the world we know—or, rather, ought to know. That call appears as early as his first book, Plain Air. There, in an extended poem titled "Mixed Blessings," McFee recounts driving his parents to sightsee around the mountains. In thepoem's seventh and final section, he writes, "we climb into / the belly of a leviathan cloud"; "the higher our car crawls," he says, "the morebrilliant and silent / everything becomes, until we stop, / alone at the heart of light." The phrasing recalls T. S. Eliot's "The Burial of the Dead," and Canto XII of Dante's Paradiso before that, so that we know where McFee imagines himself before he asks his question: "Is this how we'd have heaven?" The poet and his father open their doors, and fog runs through the car, causing the family to seem "a party of ghosts, erased, / beyond sense, pure element." The scene has moved from a tableau out ofhigh literature to something out of the popular imagination: an afterlife floating among the clouds, an existence supposedly desirable and yet, once considered, likely to be rather boring. Indeed, McFee rejects it with a penetrating rhetorical question: "Could grace be so neutral, / so numb and suffocating?" The answer of course must be no; otherwise it would be no grace at all. The poem's last lines offer an alternative: I'll take my vision fallen below the tonsure of cloudline, where real tires whimper on 30 a real shoulder, where families can carve their hard life out of the foothills and still care though shin-splinted by curves and swaybacked with foolish burdens, where the sublime is only a promise banked at the far edge of sight as the mountains' high tide watersheds light into a blue rainbow. Inher 2003 Iron Mountain Review essay on McFee, Rita Quillen finds in him a "simultaneous alienation from and attraction toward all things religious," and the above passage may seem tailor-made to support that observation. On the one hand, he begins by rejecting what waits above "the tonsure of cloudline," preferring a "fallen" world to a "numb and suffocating" heaven; on the other hand, he ends with a rainbow, that wonder explained in Genesis as a promise of God's forbearance, a sign of His faithfulness. This is not the paradox it may first seem to be. The poem expresses a sensibility that is clearly religious, but one unwilling to denigrate this life in favor of an ill-conceived sequel. The notion of an undesirable heaven also appears in "Felix Culpa," a poem from To See, McFee's collaboration with photographer Elizabeth Matheson. His poem responds to her black and white photograph of a circular swimming pool in Miami. There is no person in the picture, and, as the admirably descriptive poem relates, at first glance the image suggests a strangely inhuman perfection. This is the poem in its entirety: It's the steady pressure of paradise we can't stand, afternoon clouds level as a Renaissance chapel ceiling over the blinding horizontal of a wall, stools with flawless shadows paired, the pool, a perfect whole from any angle. And so we praise God for any trouble— one stool supplanted by a bag of tricks, deck chairs sneaking into the picture like escaped convicts, that odd wide shadow about to...