Faith and Less

Candle wax won’t drip back up the wick, the coin slot will not
cough up change, snuffers won’t breath flame. Faith goes
and won’t come back. Presto-change-o!
Just like that, an angel-robed altar boy exits the sacristy
and he’s a tousle-haired kid again, fidgeting beside you in school.

 

The ordinary emerges from the holy and sheds all mystery.
No hint it would happen 1982, Good Friday.
No Nukes concert the night before might be my excuse,
I might have wondered, what’s the use of kneeling,
keen-hearted, bent to be broken open. Then nothing.

 

Nothing like the way batter my heart, three-person’d God
sounded when Mr. C read it aloud by the hearth with tea
and Poetry Society kids whose faces shine but blank now.
Doesn’t that figure? No detail of them stays vivid. Fades as wood.
No, poetry is a lonely, lonely bare tree. Felled for furnishings.

 

Door = Arched oak, copperwork turquoise with oxygen.
Knocker = knock-knock?
Who’s there in the poems, all the poems, remains a mystery
retreating from me in ruined acolyte’s robes—never mine—
borrowed in a song-dream “Jesus just left Chicago…”

 

Candle wax won’t drip back up the wick, the coin slot will not
cough up change, snuffers won’t breath flame. Just like that
my faith in poems might go go Chicago. And not come back.


Heid E. Erdrich is author of Little Big Bully (National Poetry Series, 2019) and six other poetry collections. In addition, she edited New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018). Heid is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She teaches in the low-residency MFA in creative writing program at Augsburg University. Heid was the 2021 Glasgow distinguished writer-in-residence (virtual) at Washington and Lee University.