Prayerfully Sinning

Bryan Alec Floyd

• Publisher: The Permanent Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780932966490
• eBook ISBN: 9781504023849
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Prayerfully Sinning is a novel in verse recounting the brief love affair of a lapsed Jesuit priest and an alcoholic coed.

THE JESUIT

VII. All of us have places

All of us have places

To which we must return,

That by returning,

We might finally leave:

The noise, the nothing of fame,

—Fame’s engorgement, fame’s emptiness—

Magnified as ever

The myopia of greatness

On the poorly-lit top floor

Of the library, making up

The library’s highest story,

(So-called by a cavalier

English professor, and wag)

The High Country of the Dead

Poets: the famous: the forgotten:

Shelled in hardbacks,

Titled, time-hollowed,

And then at last

Entitled

The once great,

Presently become the past:

Their finest pieces

Their best-kept secrets

Finitely composing the whole

Racked rows of ruins,

Which decomposed

Infinitely

Up there where I was,

And when about to leave

I heard

The High Country’s

Strong and single noise,

Which was that of listening

To sound, unlike any other

In this and all other worlds:

—Memory:—(Sickened

By your sickness,

When first I found you

Drunk and all but dead

To life,

Down among your rising

And ungraved apparitions

Crawling over you

On the spidery cafeteria floor,

Where you lay, terror-webbed, and older,

Old at nineteen,

As ancient as youth

Itself, and your heart

A child’s

In my arms

For ten days, because I took you

Home to my home

In Stony Brook, and there,

Terrifically still

In d.t.’s shaking unsleep,

You willed against want to move,

Or even to dare to:

Fear-frozen,

Shivering with heat

Of fever, you felt,

And could not help but feel

Something

Like moving flesh

Upon moving bone

Move,

Slithering across your chest

And behind your eyelids, you saw

And kept seeing

Above your face

A snake, two-headed and grinning,

And you screamed

Your fear-fast hands

To the smiling heads of the snake,

Then screamed when you saw

Your fingers become

What you had them hold

As they struck and kept striking

At you, while I, who had not looked

At a woman since before

I had entered the seminary,

Looked

At anything but you,

And because, while holding you,

I would look away,

You were the only sight I saw

Those ten days: in my arms,

In my home,

In Stony Brook:

Then, on the eleventh day,

I took and left you, sobered,

In a room in the Three Village Inn,

Where, alone,

You could not stand the pain of being

Alone, nor believe

The pain would only last

Only until it ended:

When you telephoned

For me to come back, I went,

Knowing I would not leave:)—Memory:—

And as though

In a pilgrimage of penance,

Unaware that I was walking,

I walked

As if to keep myself still

Sane, walking as if

In a fugue

Of penumbras: the light o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Note
• And did those feet in ancient time
• Prologue
• The Jesuit: I. Darker than all love
• The Student: II. Some pains cease with but a beginning
• The Jesuit: III. ‘The New York Review of One Another’
• The Student: IV. “I am my breasts,” a girl
• The Jesuit: V. Awful with innocence
• The Student: VI. As perfect as a black snowflake
• The Jesuit: VII. All of us have places
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page