At the mention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mild-mannered father
—tender, abstracted—would exercise the right
to revert to type. That is to say: devout; that is, proscriptive. He would rather
we did not so bandy the good Jesuit’s name about
in talk of “gay this” and “gay that”—just as he would rather
my sister did not, from the library, request “sick” Lolita.
Like tars on a stage deck, yo ho, we roll our eyes.
Somebody snaps on the poisonous gas-fired heater
—and I put off a year or two the hypothesis
I’ll form, with a wave, to provoke him to these wobblers
that all in such matters swing from pole to pole;
as Hopkins was wont (his muse being bi[nsey] po[p]lar[s])
to swing from joy’s heights, alas, to the abyss
and for whom the mind had “mountains; cliffs of fall.”

•

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there . . . .  ” Who’s not known the hell
that fashions itself from the third night without sleep—
the third or the fourth—in whose black margins crawl
shrill horrors, and where breathless, poleaxed, pinned
—as though in the teeth of an outrageous gale—
the mind—sick—preys upon the stricken mind.
And “worst, there is none”—no none—than this wild grief:
Citalopram-wired. Our sweating selves self-cursed.
Oh, “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?”
as Hopkins wrote—but, far gone, at its worst
it’s her first form I want. Please stroke my hair.
It’s alright now. I’m here, I’m here. There, there.

Original appearance in Poetry.