With Father
Warren at Nobili Hall, January 1, 2002
As always you
wait for me—thin
St. Joseph
with his lantern and staff—and when the black
carved doors
have closed, you invite me, “Pick up and hold
that baby,”
his wooden shape incarnate in palm.
Oysters curl
in their fringed salt
and eggnog is
dispensed from a cart, for today’s feast
(once the
Circumcision). Still the same, two signs
by the
kitchen: Bless This Mess; Primordial
Soup;
and the way you
fuss over dishes, napkin, coffee.
Our ritual
lunch.
“Love is shown
more in deeds
than words,” Sixty-two years
since the
novitiate, helping me with Scripture, what
Jonah
compassed by the sea, foretold—
a note slips
from your Bible, Woman
great is thy faith
its reach,
longer than you may have thought
like a cat’s
tongue sanding my wrist.
If John was an
eagle—you, a heron, stooped yet tall—
does that make
me some garden bunting?
Protected, I was
baptized in
the Fathers’ chapel.
Now as you
walk me to my car—
some huge
trees have been lopped—I’m mindful of your
late-Autumn
voice, fourteen years ago. “Wait,” you
said
“Wait, and be
born with Our Lord”
Who pitched
his tent among us;
this
wolf-month arriving in slivers of glass eel rain,
one morning’s
golden pheasant sun,
and overhead
tonight a distant cold
Orion pulling
at his dogs.
Elizabeth
Biller Chapman