My Bishop and Other Poems

Michael Collier

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226570860
• eBook ISBN: 9780226571058
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Think of a time when you've feigned courage to make a friend, feigned forgiveness to keep one, or feigned indifference to simply stay out of it. What does it mean for our intimacies to fail us when we need them most?

The poems of this collection explore such everyday dualities—how the human need for attachment is as much a source of pain as of vitality and how our longing for transcendence often leads to sinister complicities. The title poem tells the conflicted and devastating story of the poet's friendship with the now-disgraced Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, interweaving fragments of his parents' funerals, which the Bishop concelebrated, with memories of his childhood spiritual leanings and how they were disrupted by a pedophilic priest the Bishop failed to protect him from.

This meditation on spiritual life, physical death, and betrayal is joined by an array of poised, short lyrics and expansive prose poems exploring how the terror and unpredictability of our era intrudes on our most intimate moments. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, Huey Newton's trial, Thomas Jefferson's bees, a piano in the woods, or his own fraught friendship with the disgraced Catholic Bishop, his syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and flawless ear bring the felt—and sometimes frightening—dimensions of the mundane to life. Throughout, this collection pursues a quiet but ferocious need to get to the bottom of things.

THE STORM

Our landlord, a federal bureaucrat, would sit in his car

across the street at the end of the month to collect rent.

He had a scarlet birthmark covering his neck

and tinting the lobe of his left ear. That’s what

you got for a $125 a month on Capitol Hill

in 1981, a landlord afraid to enter his own building

and a three-hundred-square-foot “garden” apartment.

I did odd jobs for him, painting the long, dark

brick passageway that went past our door,

into the concrete yard and unpaved eeriness of the alley,

and twice repaired locks on apartments upstairs

that had been burglarized. One victim, a newly divorced

woman in her midthirties who lived above us, broke her lease

and moved out. She had dark hair in a style more suitable

for someone much older, combed over on top to disguise a thin spot.

In my mother’s parlance, she seemed “ill-equipped to deal with life.”

When I called the landlord to say she had “vacated the premises,”

a phrase that came out of my mouth involuntarily, he was silent

for several seconds before calling her a “fuck.”

I thought she’d done the right thing considering how

shaken she was and that, among other things, as I was installing

a dead bolt, she said it felt as if she’d been raped, actually,

she used the phrase “gang raped,” which seemed hyperbole

to me until I told my wife who without pausing said of course

that’s what you’d feel if you were a woman.

Night or day it was the kind of neighborhood

where if something happened you couldn’t trust someone

to come to your aid, like the evening my wife and I

were fixing dinner and heard over the radio’s drone,

or perhaps through it, what sounded like shouts and screams

or cries; all three, I guess. Beyond the window we could see

a woman flailing, on her side in the street. By the time I reached her

she was up and pointing down the block to a figure running away.

Instinct of a kind I’d never felt sent me after the man

but only the distance of a house or two until another more familiar instinct

sent me back to the woman who was now rubbing the side of her face,

and from instinct, too, I put my arm around her and then,

I don’t know how else to say it, she “buried” her face in my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

· · ·

When one of my sons turned twenty-five, I calculated how old

I would be when he turned fifty, if I were still alive, and then

it occurred to me that after I die his age will begin

to catch up to mine, until at some point in the future,

if he lives long enough, we will for one year

be the same age, the only time in our lives, so to speak,

when I am not keeping ahead of him moving toward death

and he has not yet surpassed me, and in order for me to experience

what he will experience that day, I will have to live until

I’m a month shy of ninety-six, which is how long my father lived.

· · ·

The afternoon the Air Florida jet crashed in the Potomac

I was working in the basement apartment on Tenth Street.

The blizzard had been accompanied by lightning and thunder,

big booms and flashes, as if there were a storm within a storm.

By noon the schoolyard across the street had close to a foot.

One of the many times I got up from my work to look out

the small window, I saw a group of boys tramping slowly

in a jagged file across the playground, each carrying a large

household item: a TV with its cord dragging, a turntable atop

an amplifier, speakers, an IBM typewriter. The last boy dragged

a red plastic sled with a bulky, olive-green duffel bag as freight.

“Looters in the Snow,” I thought, like a Bruegel painting.

We lived close enough to National to hear planes land

and take off, intermittent muffled rumblings I’d learned

to ignore, although at first I tracked them tensely

like a passenger strapped in his seat silently urging the plane up.

Back then, I was afraid of so many things. I dealt with fear

by acting brave and impervious, cultivating as well

an ironic bonhomie that covered up the effort.

Everything was an effort, so I made effortlessness my goal.

At night, what I’d avoided during the day appeared

in the form of my child self: a pale, chubby, asthmatic boy

brought too easily to tears, who could not say no for cowardice

the time at the state fair he rode “The Hammer” with an older boy he admired.

Rising in the gondola above the midway with its tantalizing lights,

he felt alive in a peculiar but appealing way as it rocked gently.

For a moment courage was like gaining altitude incrementally

and yet, from having waited his turn in line, he knew what was coming.

If you want to know what fear looks like, look at the boy

when he finishes the ride. He’s smiling because he thinks

everyone is watching him, and that’s why, too, when his friend suggests

they ride again he keeps smiling and can’t believe what he’s agreed to do.

· · ·

Along with the hospice nurse, who kept increasing his morphine,

reassuring me she had the orders for upping the dose,

which meant she was hastening his departure, I was with my father when he died.

And yet the nurse, whose name I can’t remember, although

I promised myself never to forget, had been trying hard to keep him alive.

She brought out a nebulizer to help him breathe.

“Robert, cough. Cough, Robert,” she urged.

He hadn’t responded to either of us for several hours, yet we could

hear him struggling to comply or maybe he was trying to speak.

No matter, a few hours later the nurse told me quietly he was near the end

and if family wanted to see him before he passed I should let them know.

What took them so long getting there I didn’t ask.

The nurse stayed with us, meaning my father and me, as I kept waiting

for my sisters and brothers-in-law to come through the door or kept hoping

they wouldn’t so I would have the moment to myself, not to myself

but for myself, with my father, whose ragged breathing, occa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Meadow
• A Wild Tom Turkey
• Strands of Hair in a Used Book
• Three
• Jefferson’s Bees
• Early Summer
• To a Lemon
• Len Bias, a Bouquet of Flowers, and Ms. Brooks
• Emily Dickinson
• Koi
• Boom Boom
• My Bishop
• Anecdote of the Piano in the Woods
• Vitalis
• The Storm
• My Father as a Maple Tree
• Last Morning with Steve Orlen
• Funky Stuff
• To Isabella Franconati
• Bronze Foot in a Glass Case
• Notes