Crazy Stable

In honor of Poem in Your Pocket Day, and the very first blooming of my pale, pale lilac, here is "Lilacs" by Amy Lowell. Actually, it's the first two of four stanzas; Amy takes lilacs as seriously as I do.

Lilacs,

False blue,

White,

Purple,

Color of lilac,

Your great puffs of flowers

Are everywhere in this my New England.

Among your heart-shaped leaves

Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing

Their little weak soft songs;

In the crooks of your branches

The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs

Peer restlessly through the light and shadow

Of all Springs.

Lilacs in dooryards

Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;

Lilacs watching a deserted house

Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;

Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom

Above a cellar dug into a hill.

You are everywhere.

You were everywhere.

You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,

And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.

You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,

You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver.

And her husband an image of pure gold.

You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms

Through the wide doors of Custom Houses—

You, and sandal-wood, and tea,

Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks

When a ship was in from China.

You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men,

May is a month for flitting.”

Until they writhed on their high stools

And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers.

Paradoxical New England clerks,

Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night,

So many verses before bed-time,

Because it was the Bible.

The dead fed you

Amid the slant stones of graveyards.

Pale ghosts who planted you

Came in the nighttime

And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.

You are of the green sea,

And of the stone hills which reach a long distance.

You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles,

You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home.

You cover the blind sides of greenhouses

And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass

To your friends, the grapes, inside.

(To read the rest, and you won't be sorry you did, go here.)

Amy Lowell, “Lilacs” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Brinton P. Roberts, and G. D'Andelot, Esquire

It may be Eastertide, time of resurrection, but there is some really cool dead stuff decorating the premises just now. Try to imagine the scenario whereby one of Bagel's kin managed to expire while half-inserted into our porch lattice. Heart attack? Cat ambush from within? Either way, it's one less quadruped whose pitty-patting feet will be heard within our walls. Daughter was the one who noticed that he appears "deflated." I feel like leaving him there to observe his passage into Squirrel Jerky; maybe I could get an NEA grant for that as a piece of installation art.

On the south side of the house, I've been doing just that--observing the slow dance of decay--on this beautiful blue jay since last fall. His feathers are still vivid, even as his little skull has started to emerge. I suppose I should inter him with respect somewhere (but not on top of one of the cats' graves).

Lest you think that all is rot and corruption around the CrazyStable, here are some proud-Mama shots of the front garden. Spirea (I think)...

vinca...and my brave pot of pansies, which Bagel dug up five times before I finally foiled him by laying pieces of slate across the soil. Hey, guy, you wanna see what happens if you mess with my flower pots? Check out your buddy up the alley.

Now I am terrified at the Earth,

it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

Walt Whitman

It's funny how every Holy Week, the poor ad-starved newsweeklies "get religion" for their cover stories. This year, Newsweek tries to stir the pot with a dire red-on-black headline: "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." One hears the editor add hopefully, in the spirit of Coffee Talk: "Discuss amongst yourselves."

The article is a muddled but earnest attempt to knit together the recent modest statistical downturn in "self-identified Christians" (and upturn in agnostics and atheists) with the political becalming of the so-called Religious Right, Christopher Hitchens, Obama, and, probably, the declining fertility of the Easter Bunny. As a "self-identified" New York City Catholic, I can't say this is exactly my story; some of my most faithful Christian friends tend to be social-justice liberals who cock a worried eyebrow at my scary pro-life sentiments. But the larger question--whether we're now a "post-Christian nation"--has the whiff of timeliness to it, and not just because today is Good Friday.

How "post-Christian" are we? Well, just in the past few years, "post" enough for Jesus to have slipped several major notches in the cultural canon. Yes, we've been pretty hard to shock for several decades now, but there's a new frat-boy casualness to mocking Our Lord.  Some of it really is funny, if you already consider Jesus your friend and not above a little ribbing. I'm personally fond of the Jesus Action Figure from Archie McPhee (left), put to good use by LOLcats (right).

Elsewhere, the Lord has been popping up more frequently as an icon of mere nuttiness, unmoored from the scholarly ballast that made Monty Python's Life of Brian so sharp and even perversely reverent. He's been rocked by Steve Coogan and Jack Black; reverence-wise, He's edging into becoming just another "character" in the Hallowe'en-costume pantheon at Party City. (Somehow, I blame Xenu, the first truly ludicrous modern deity, for at least a small part of this ribald relativism.) I don't watch "Family Guy," but a few weeks ago I flipped past as they sent up Christ as a wine-pouring sleazy playboy. These days, I guess that sort of thing doesn't merit a whimper, much less a boycott.

Of all days, today is one of reassurance. Because that's how He ended His life, before taking it up anew: as just a man among other men, kicked to the ground and jeered at. His own friends had vanished in cowardice; snark ruled the day, from the elegant musing of Pilate ("What is truth?") to the testosterone-fueled antics of the soldiers. It's only in medieval art or modern cinema that we can cue the halo or the sanctifying lighting. On the real Good Friday, He must have looked like hell, and the memory of His brief glory days must have seemed like a mortal embarrassment to all but the women who were with Him to the end. (Apparently, they didn't give a rat's ass about the three-hour-old post-Christian era.)

Maybe a "Christian America," whatever that looked like (or would have looked like in its conservative dream-state), makes things too easy for us. He was never about triumphalism. He was about being recognized, by one heart at a time, dead or alive again.

"If, at the moment of our death, death comes to us as an unwelcome stranger, it will be because Christ also has always been to us an unwelcome stranger. For when death comes, Christ comes also, bringing us the everlasting life which he has bought for us by His own death."

--Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

Fra Angelico, Lamentation over the Dead Christ