DOUBT

A failure, my love affair with the idea of Jesus,
indelible residue of Sunday school and choir robes,
bludgeons of sanctimony and sin,
smothered in mother love. She loved, believed: me too, Mommy!
God, I loved her, remembered verses for her, thought I loved God for her.
I follow full skirt swishing, high heels clicking us up the stairs of Army chapels,
all those ugly places of my rootless youth.
Ugly smelled good each Sunday, bouquets and polished pews
that you could slide on with long pants.
I stand tall on pull-down knee-benches installed for the Catholics:
the only Protestant Italian in the world, such a good boy.
My proto-soprano voice floats up towards God and anybody else who might notice.
‘My, ain’t he dressed nice this morning?’

I took Mark Twain as text, Mysterious Stranger,
stranger I became one day in my 16th year, stand-in boy preacher
in a Methodist cavern hiding knots of faithful whites, not dead,
not yet fled from Jersey, they stayed for Youth Sunday.
I gripped the podium, hole in my heart, took a detour at Corinthians,
tongues of men and angels, brass and cymbals
sent me into the embrace of faith’s inevitable corollary.
“There is no God,” Twain’s Satan told us: I bought it.
Mommy faith dimmed by the glimmer and gale of doubt,
extinguished when Monsieur Thibault, Gaullist and gray, in second form,
spat the translation out like poison with a precise accent Parisienne.
J.-P. Sartre grabbed Jesus Christ by the scruff of the neck and threw him out the window!

This same defenestration I soon delivered to Karl Marx
and his pantheon of word boys --- they didn’t last long,
replaced by oh, so many gods, served up in bottles, on mirrors,
on my knees in gutters without faith or hope. I needed too many windows!

Faith becomes its own reward, and doubt predicts.
Come play this silly game for savage fools, sweetbreads for brains on a plate.
Opiate, Karl said, of the masses, terrified by one single truth, common as dirt.
Oh how I long to be a boy soprano again!

September 1, 2007