Calvin Festival, the Vortex, and Franz

Sometimes my on-going conversion feels like a tornado keeps touching down, sweeping me up, spinning me senseless and abruptly flinging me onto the hard ground of someplace I thought I'd never be. Like the Catholic Church. And it's never where I thought was home. Never Kansas. But not quite Oz, either.

I went to the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing to do nothing. Just hang with my confirmed (literally) bff Lisa Samson and recharge my writer batteries. Why do I think I will just do nothing at any time? Of course I found myself right back in the vortex, my ambition flying wildly, and me screeching because just last week my future seemed almost tame and made sense. Then BLAM! I'm on strange (though familiar) territory and life is suddenly different. I'm not in Kansas and the whole writing future thing is somewhere else or even, for a time, no place at all. For me, on-going conversion is violent, leaving me limping and with both a broken hip and a blessing.

But there is always that gentle surprise that lets me know a winsome, lovely Jesus loves us all. For me, for all the wonders at Calvin this weekend, there was my quiet falling deeply in literary love. His name is Franz Wright. I didn't care that he won the Pulitzer Prize. He captivated me immediately by his ragamuffin demeanor and quiet voice I had to strain to hear, even though he spoke in a microphone. He was like me. I just knew it, his broken pieces now bonded together with the Bread and Wine that is life. Like me he loves words, only he's honored this part of himself and served it. I have not. He's bipolar. I knew it immediately. He was saturated in sorrow and grace. I could have written his poem myself--if I honored the craft as he does. What I mean is I have lived this poem.

The Only Animal

The only animal that commits suicide

went for a walk in the park,

basked on a hard bench

in the first star,

traveled to the edge of space

in an armchair

while company quietly

talked, and abruptly

returned,

the room empty

The only animal that cries,

that takes off its clothes

and reports to the mirror, the one

and only animal

that brushes its own teeth—

somewhere

the only animal that smokes a cigarette,

that lies down and flies backward in time,

that rises and walks to a book

and looks up a word

heard the telephone ringing

in the darkness downstairs and decided

to answer no more.

And I understand,

too well: how many times

have I made the decision to dwell

from now on

in the hour of my death

(the space I took up here

scarlessly closing like water)

and said I’m never coming back,

and yet

this morning

I stood once again

in this world,

the garden

ark and vacant

tomb of what

I can’t imagine,

between twin eternities,

some sort of wings,

more or less equidistantly

exiled from both,

hovering in the dreaming called

being awake, where

You gave me

in secret one thing

to perceive, the

tall blue starry

strangeness of being

here at all.

You gave us each in secret one thing to perceive.

Furless now, upright, My banished

and experimental

child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.

Now that's a poem, lovies. That is a poem.

I couldn't stop thinking of it. Or him. The way he sat in his chair, as if he had no right to be there, carelessly tossing words on me like blossoms after a long, cold season of no green. I don't write much poetry, but I love it. I wrote Franz a poem:

Just a note...

Dear Franz,

I know you. I've seen your back curved into a question mark with sorrow arching and descending till it plunges straight down into an empty space. An emptiness interrupted by a black circle of pain much too heavy to hold.

I know you, even though I don't.

I've never heard your voice though I've lived with it through a thousand winters. Even now I feel it murmuring, a breath flowing through the hollow body of a flute, filling cavernous holes in me with music.

Jesus told me about people like you. Said you were poor in spirit. I thought, once again, who the hell wants to be poor? But because He said it, I pondered it in my heart. He said you were blessed.

Yours is the kingdom of heaven.

Only sometimes heaven takes a really long time to see.

I just wanted to write to say I know you. Even though I don't. And I've always heard you, your voice falling down and covering me like snow on a grave. And I still ponder you in my heart, even though Jesus said you're blessed. Or maybe because of it.

mair francis