#285

Much petted Henry like a petal throve,

his narthex let the girls & pupils in,

aptotic he remained

Henry’s own man, when he squirmed not in love,

fifty pressures herded one discipline:

the sun shot up, it rained,

weathering Henry kept on his own side,

whatever in the name of God that side was.

And he struggled, pal.

Apricate never: too he took in his stride

more than most monsters can. Whatever the cause

they called him Madrigal

and Introit, passing him on the road

wherever they were going and were gone.

Henry peered quite alone

as if the worlds would answer to a code

just around the corner, down gelid dawn,

beckoning like a moan.

“Narthex”: the entryway to a church. “Aptotic”: From linguistics, archaic. Refers to languages that have no grammatical inflections. Uninflected. [Its use here means something like “unaffected.”] “Apricate”: to bask in the sun. “Introit”: A song or recitation for when the priest approaches the altar. “Gelid”: extremely cold.

Had to give the dictionary a workout on this one. All the pressures on Henry press him on toward one thing: His arcane discipline. This poem is an intense exposition of a complex emotional and existential state: Reserved and engaged; working in isolation on one’s own fascinations, passions, obsessions, needs; permitting outward attention only so far; struggling desperately, alone, against oneself; accosting a strange world through a splendid, desperate dread; a monster in a monstrous struggle; attempting to develop coded solutions to crises no one else can acknowledge, nor cares to; twisting in a gauntlet of insubstantial devils who wield words and self-loathing like whips. Why is that man writhing at the edge of that cliff, Mommy? He’s writing, dear. Henry is upright in a sandstorm of poems while the grit of language bloodies his scalp and tears out his hair, confessing the hard, white dome of skull. Relief and answer must lie just there, he thinks. There has to be an answer. But what is the question? Is it “Who am I? How did I get here?”?