Doing Lines at the Cocktail Party

October and even the air's professorial,
the day's deathlecture droning down in gray.
         · · · ·
Pleasure, too, has its puritans.
its fanged savorings:
no meal so mediocre
that she'd allow some comfort in shared complaint.
         · · · ·
—oh him and his puny glooms:
the dainties a dancer needs for nakedness to even be a thing.
         · · · ·
Some intimate distance in the not-quite-light,
bombed-out small talk, skeletal chuckles:
two people grappling with the memory
of having grappled.
         · · · ·
A coolness through which one nevertheless sweats,
like a friendship distance has thinned.
         · · · ·
A sadness blaster, she said she was, scouring the house
with a kind of sexual psychic pesticide—
not altogether unavailing, I have to say.
         · · · ·
That air of creepy connoisseurship about him.
I felt as if I'd been sipped and set back down
by one who needed a moment to name the vintage.
         · · · ·
I too annihilated all the little envies.
I too intuited the glorious swell
of Lady Marbury's marberries—
and looked away.
         · · · ·
. . . something about him at once so consolingly formal
and devastatingly irrelevant, like a mortuary fern . . .
         · · · ·
Capacity for happiness. He actually said that.
He'd discovered in himself a capacity for happiness.
It was as if some immense idiocy
had come to complete fruition in him,
like the century plant
that every hundred years flowers and fouls the air
with its ironic resplendence,
its stalk of skunk.
         · · · ·
The sad panache and fluent gloom of the golden boy gone old.
         · · · ·
And her, the earth of her, all salt and tang, you could serve her on ice.

Poetry: Eight Distillations

by: Christian Wiman

From the illustrations to The Divine Comedy by Gustave Doré

Apophatic
He talked of nothingness until it wasn’t.
He bragged his gravity into God.

Convert
What did he learn when he learned of his own bad heart?
That scared and sacred are but a beat apart.

Skeptic
His eyes were open but his heart was shut.
At the edge of every wonder he said But...

Inspiration
The clearest morning is a thing to bear,
he writes, overjoyed, as usual, by despair.

Knowledge
To touch the summit was to learn so much.
Among which:
there are some summits that you cannot touch.

Faith Is Action!
Me and my guillotine dreams:
Every impulse ends in seems.

Via Negativa
He names his love by naming what he hates.
Joy generalizes. Pain individuates.

Apophatic
Why wouldn’t I praise the vacuous black?
The one abundance I could trust was lack.

"The moment of descent, the mirror of grace, is the essence of all music"

"Art has no immediate future because all art is collective"

Simone Weil

"All the Christian churches are being forced to an inevitable, honest, and somewhat humiliating conclusion. The vast majority of Christian ministry has been concerned with 'churching' people into symbolic, restful, and usually ethnic belonging systems rather than any real spiritual transformation into the mystery of God"

"We have had far too much priesthood and almost no room for prophets"