Beginnings

Paul Mariani

To begin with, there’s the matter of the lost letters: letters I wrote my mother a third of a century ago, during the year I spent seeking entry into the priesthood at the Marianist Preparatory in Beacon, New York. Those letters, sent home at the rate of one or two a week, I long ago saw her cut to shreds during one of her depressions, when, in the work of a single afternoon, she made a sacrifice of whatever symbols of her past she could lay hands on, and which on this occasion included not only batches of family photographs, but my letters. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the void caused by the destruction of the life contained in these early letters has been one reason why—as a biographer—I have spent the last twenty years poring over the letters of others and why I find myself as a poet, in spite of my best intentions to do otherwise, preoccupied with retrieving whatever pieces of the past I can from the cold ashes of history.
    In place of documents, then, images. Images of the old Marianist Preparatory at Beacon thirty-five years ago. I can still see the foursquare, four-storied Victorian structure with its oversized drafty rooms, its high ceilings, its tall dusty windows looking out over Mount Beacon several miles to the east, with the Easter moon rising above it. The study hall, with its large recreation room, its two dark green pingpong tables, its stacks of beige metal foldaway chairs, its comfortable, nondescript, seedy loungers. Upstairs were the creamed-spinach colored classrooms where we learned Latin and English and history and, on the top floor, the large dormitory with its ancient, public porcelain washing troughs and its tiny infirmary off to one side. Forty boys, from Ohio farms and cities like Yonkers and Dayton, boys ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen, and all testing the wings of their fledgling vocations.
    The building is gone now, along with the chapel, the rectory, the tool sheds, the dining hall down the old tar road which housed the handful of German nuns who fed us. Even the chlorine-leaking pool, surrounded by its green wooden dressing stalls, is gone. From the time I was fourteen I lived in Mineola, a suburban town with an old town flavor situated thirty miles east of Manhattan on Long Island. My mother saw somehow that I attended the very fine local Catholic high school, Chaminade High. This was run by Roman Catholic priests and brothers who belonged to the Society of Mary, or the Marianists. I remember vividly at the end of my junior year the earnest young priest calling me into his office and inviting me to consider joining the Order. I considered, and, since my name had been so cleverly embedded in the Order’s, including even an “st,” I took it as a youthful, onomastic sign that I had been predestined to spend my life among these men. And so, at the beginning of September, 1956, my mother and father drove me the ninety miles from Mineola up Route 9 to Beacon, in the old, two-tone green DeSoto, so that I could begin my long journey to the priesthood. I was sixteen and a half.
    When I last saw Beacon, eighteen years ago, I was married and the father of three sons. I was on my way home to western Massachusetts after lecturing on literature to the assembled freshmen cadets at West Point, and decided to cross the Hudson at Newburgh and pay a visit to my old school. It was the spring of 1972 and after eight weary years of hunting for the Snark, American B-52S were still dropping napalm clusters over the jungles and hamlets of Vietnam. The beaming face of Eisenhower, which had shone in our study hall in 1956, had given way to Kennedy and then Johnson and then to Nixon. There was even a bridge across the Hudson between Newburgh and Beacon, where once the old ferry had steamed across the river.
    But by then, except for the old macadam road that joined the study hall to the dining hall, and the expanse of ancient elms and maples which dotted the old estate, the Preparatory was gone. The buildings themselves had been razed and a new public school stood in its place. My only consolation that blue spring morning was seeing Mount Beacon shimmering in the distance like the old familiar shadow of God. But even that had been denuded of its old funicular railway, the one I had once ridden to the top of the world.
    Images from my year at Beacon still rise from the mists of the unconscious with a frequency and vividness out of all proportion to the time I spent there. Most of these images are peaceful beyond belief—autumn clouds hanging below the top of Mount Beacon, bobsledding down the precipitous hill behind the study hall and crashing through a rush of pure white powder, quizzical robins jackhopping across the acorn-studded football field. Perhaps it is merely the nostalgia of youth, but I seem then to have lived closer to the changing seasons, and I can still summon the smells of that summer’s hay, the burning leaves at Halloween, the acrid, nutty taste of venison meatballs concocted from the roadkill a friendly state trooper had brought us, the awesome cracking of boughs under the weight of ice breaking the silence of the long winter’s night, incense billowing around the small gothic altar at Easter, the ethereal light of burning candles guiding us through the snow as we made our way to Christmas Midnight Mass. But I also know from the few surviving letters I wrote my brother, Walter, and my friends that there were darker moments too: the violence of a bully’s sudden shove from behind; a slow-witted farm boy singled out before the class for defecating in a shower stall; cold, rainy Sunday afternoons when I would have given anything to be back home.
    I do not know what finally happened to my religious calling, whether it atrophied, or—I hope—with the passage of the years it underwent a sea change into something new. But I do know that when I returned home the following July I still half-believed that, come September, I would go on to the novitiate at Mount Marcy, high in the Adirondacks. Half-believed, for already something in the smell of the late summer roses and the insistent music of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender,” combined with the possibility that, come September, I could be dating girls from the local public high school, had become temptations against which I no longer cared to struggle. So, when the time came to head north into the mountains, I opted instead to stay in Mineola.
    And yet I still count that year at Beacon as the time when I saw I would one day be a teacher and, beyond that—miracle of miracles (for there were no precedents for such a dream in my family)—a writer. In retrospect I seem to have been fated to become a teacher, and in truth I can date my knowledge of that fact to an overcast afternoon that November at Beacon, when I stood on the hardening field guarding a soccer goal post. It is a moment linked now in my memory with those black and white images from Life magazine tacked up on the study hall bulletin board: images of the bodies of the dreaded NKVD lying on the cobbled streets of Budapest and spattered with lime to speed their decomposition. There are other images too: of young freedom fighters, some no older than myself, defiantly brandishing Russian tommyguns as they struggled to bring their own order into being.
    For one dizzying moment that fall afternoon the noisy surge of youthful energy following the soccer ball had collected at the other end of the field and I was left alone to daydream. Then, out of nowhere apparently, the image took hold of me: an image so powerful and seductive that I am still able to call it up with the heady passions of my youth: a cheerleader in a short, flared, maroon velvet skirt, her brown hair in a ponytail. She glances repeatedly at me as she twirls her baton and goes through her cheerleading routine. For my part, I find myself following her every gesture—one two three one two three—at the same time promising le Bon Dieu that, when I finally leave the Marianists, I will—as a peace offering for my proposed apostasy—bring the same dedication to teaching and to words that as a priest I had thought to bring to the Word.
    I understand now that what I was doing then was making a rather crass bargain. But, as old Brother Alfred had explained when his false teeth suddenly fell out in the middle of a lecture and he quickly pushed them back into his head without further ceremony, “necessity knows no law.” So too with the bargain I made that afternoon. Necessity, biological necessity, I told myself, was beyond the law I had set myself to follow.
    There was no one there that afternoon to witness the little drama taking place on a soccer field beneath the sighing elms. No one, that is, beyond the long shadow of God. Which was, of course, enough, so that I still check myself at the beginning of each school year to see if I’ve kept to the spirit of my youthful covenant.
    At Beacon I learned things which now seem impossibly idealistic, as if a young Quixote had set off to conquer the world for the greater glory of the Word armed only with a leaky pen. In our family, after all, one would not have considered teaching, much less writing, a viable option for one’s life-work. From my father’s vantage especially, there always seemed to be more pressing demands than books, by which he meant hard, manual work. There were six kids in our family when I left for Beacon, and the seventh and last would arrive just after I returned home. My mother would name her Regina Maria since, splendid, dear romantic that she was, she felt that, in sacrificing her oldest to the priesthood, she had been given this baby to compensate for her loss. For my father, then, life was a question of forever finding a way to clothe and feed his small army.
    During the war—the Big One, as he used to call it—my father, who during the Depression had learned the gas station trade in Manhattan and Queens, rose to the rank of Technical Sergeant. He spent most of his tour of duty at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, instructing other men in the repair of heavy equipment and testing the new Sherman tanks which were being shipped overseas to France. Whatever else the Army taught him, my father certainly learned a sense of order and discipline that he early passed on to his children, so that I still find myself “policing the area” for stray litter, cans, and cigarette butts before I walk through the door into my own house.
Outside, then, of the ubiquitous comic books and the daily newspapers, to read in our family was to read classroom textbooks as a way of educating oneself for landing a good job, preferably—as my father hoped for all of us—a safe civil service job with a modest pension waiting at the end of forty years. The novel, the short story, or the very occasional poem I read were those assigned in class, pored over not for themselves but as a way of getting on. Robert Frost once remarked that the real descendants of the New World Puritans are the New World Catholics, with their strong sense of duty and responsibility. How, I have wondered, had Frost found out our secret? For even into my thirties, I had difficulty with Wallace Stevens’s dictum that good writing must give pleasure. Did that mean that pleasure was a legitimate end in itself, rather than something seized as one labored towards a goal? And wasn’t doing something for the sheer delight of it suspiciously like engaging in sex without having children, something, as the old Schoolmen had taught, contra naturam?
    And yet, busy as he was trying to feed a family of nine on less than two hundred dollars a week, I remember my father as a reader of history and biography, especially of figures like Cardinal Spellman and Pius XII, of Churchill and Eisenhower and Senator McCarthy, the last of whom my father firmly believed had helped save his country from the Red Peril.
    My mother’s reading habits were both simpler and more complex, and since for several years she worked in the Doubleday Book Company’s offices in Garden City, the next town over from where we lived, she brought home books for me to read. Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Stories was one such book, Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain another. Besides her monthly perusal of Reader’s Digest, she read all of James Michener’s novels, as well as romantic novels by the carton, and sometimes even riskier things. That summer I returned from Beacon, for instance, I found on her dresser in a brown paper cover Henry Miller’s deliriously forbidden Tropic of Cancer. Trained as I was then in the standards of the Legion of Decency, I trembled at what I read and even considered burning the book before I put it back down and shut the door to her room.
    Once I even lectured my seventeen-year-old brother, Walter, for wasting his time reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road instead of something more uplifting, such as the moral writings of Epictetus, as I was doing. That was in 1959, at the end of my first year at Manhattan, and I still shudder when I think of what a pompous prince I was. Not of course that Walter gave, as he phrased it, “a rat’s ass” for what I thought. He, at least, read for pleasure.
    For the most part, though, my family hardly ever discussed with each other the books they read. The most I ventured, being the first in my family to have graduated from high school and gone on to college, was to rehash some of the ideas my professors of philosophy had lectured us about. I’d spin out some thought, such as Plato’s on Ideal Justice, and, when the talk threatened to become esoteric, my father, at the other end of the long dinner table, would fix me with a summarizing stare and say simply that there was nothing right or wrong but thinking made it so. It was his way of letting me know that the college bullshit session was over.

That was my adventure in reading. As for writing, that meant school essays, business letters, lists of qualifications for landing a job. We had no use then for writing as a means of expressing ourselves, and in fact that term would not take on meaning for at least another decade. By then, having taught Hunter undergraduates, as well as rookie cops and homicide detectives from among New York’s finest and—in the evenings—tired stenographers and bank clerks who took my continuing education classes, I felt I had at least earned the right to write about literature, in baroque essays on Carlyle and Conrad and Austen, explications de texte of Chaucer, Donne, and T. S. Eliot, and—finally—in a basement stall in the library of Queens College, a dissertation on the sonnets of Hopkins.
    Except for a one-semester course in creative writing I took with the poet John Fandel in the spring of ’62 in my final year at Manhattan College, I did not spend time writing anything more creative than essays. Writing about literature, and—better—teaching it, I could justify because they were a way of making a living. After all, at least teaching was a profession, if not a particularly well-paying one. Besides, as my father used to like to say, it put bread on the table. Yes, the fifties were a boom time, but—he warned me— there was always the grinning specter of another Depression. Better to be the ant than the stupid grasshopper with his fiddle left out in the cold. In the meantime, the beginnings of my dialogue with literature, like my earlier dialogue with God, bode its time, patiently waiting in the wings, humming to itself and paring its fingernails.
    In truth, my “accommodation” to literature did not change substantially until eighteen years after my year at Beacon, that is, until the spring of 1973, when the Italian poet, Giovanni Giudicci, at the time a guest in my home, read a handful of my unpublished poems and found there, as he said, something to like. Stop writing about poetry, he advised me, and spend more time writing it. Or, as he phrased it, evoking once more for me the lost world of Beacon, it was time now to stop playing the altar boy before the high altar of art and begin to ascend the steps of Mount Tabor and Olympus to the priesthood of the imagination.
    Perhaps there is something of the maternal about all beginnings: a sense of harboring, of nurturing, the sense of a disembodied smile hovering protectively over an author’s infant gurglings. The Christmas story is like this: a story told and told again by our young mothers about how special we were, of how figures bearing gifts came from afar to gaze upon us. In these early stories about our origins most of us encounter for the only time in our lives a moment when history itself takes second place to one’s mewling, princely ego, that ego which insists on taking stage center from the instant it arrives.
    I wish I could remember the name of the outdated, navy blue-covered anthology of literature I was given to read that year at Beacon, or find the notebook I kept, outlining the introductions to the various historical periods of English literature with such meticulousness that, like one of the monks in the novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, I wound up virtually transcribing the entire text to my notebook, page by page exact, believing the physical act of copying would etch those literary facts into my brain. How many hours I spent in the darkening study hall, panning the ore of that riverine text in the hopes of finding gold.
    There was, it seems now, something nearly hagiographic about the books I pored over that year. Not only the first two books of The Aeneid for Latin, but also a scholarly life of my namesake, St. Paul, a large book I read for months, drawn in particular by the figure of the intense young disciple seated at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel. Then, for my seventeenth birthday, my mother —at no small sacrifice to herself—bought and sent me, along with a pair of discount shoes, another blue-backed book: this one a copy of MacKinlay Kantor’s just-published Civil War novel, Andersonville. Fascinated from my twelfth year on by stories of the Civil War, I read the book greedily, a piece each day during my few free moments, until Brother Clyde, skimming it for objectionable material, discovered a passage that flirted with bestiality and insisted that I turn my attention to other, more edifying topics for the present.
    As an antidote to Kantor, he suggested I read the Catholic apologist, G. K. Chesterton, with excursions into Hillaire Belloc. Belloc I found both vicious and half-mad and quickly abandoned. But I did read a dozen or so of Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories, his life of St. Francis, parts of The Everlasting Man, and even Chesterton’s biography. I expressed such an interest in him, in fact, that I managed to get a pass into town to continue my reading at the public library there. After three months of containment, here was the freedom actually to walk unescorted beyond the stone walls of the preparatory and down into town, among people out raking their lawns and tending their gardens, where I could watch the smoke of late autumn leaves circling lazily along the curbs of those impossibly innocent streets.
    If the Hungarian uprising is one of my most vivid memories from that time, so too is the American Revolution, for the Continental Army had once encamped here at Beacon, as well as across the river at Newburgh. Beacon is an old river town, situated high on the eastern shore of the oil-stained, still-majestic Hudson, and Washington’s headquarters were across the river at Newburgh, an old white town drowsing in the distance, reached by an antiquated ferry. On the afternoon of Washington’s Birthday, a brilliantly cold February day, the entire prep marched the two miles down to the landing and then ferried across to visit those headquarters.
    I remember the old regimental flags furled, the curved swords, the muskets stacked in the ancient glass cases along the walls of the stone cottage which had served Washington’s staff nearly two centuries earlier. But mostly I remember how engrossed I was as I stood near the prow of the ferry reading the anti-Catholic pamphlets I’d found on a rack there at the landing. These had been published by some fundamentalist sect out of Tampa, and they asked in a heady, quasi-illiterate, thunder-and-brimstone voice how any right-thinking American could believe in a wafer god or pay allegiance to the scarlet whore of Babylon. I remember thinking that, if at sixteen I did not yet have the answers to these questions, Brother Clyde surely would. And if he didn’t, well, surely the answers were written down somewhere in the universe. Surely G. K. Chesterton, that three-hundred-pound white knight, would have been able to hack to bits the slithy toves of doubt those pamphlets had spewed forth. One could arm-wrestle false words with the right words, I was sure, and one could emerge victorious, as the father of our country had done.
    But that was for others to do. For already it was the words themselves which fascinated me, and the rhythmic situation in which I found them: the iambic chuff Chuff chuff Chuff of the straining ferryboat’s pistons vibrating through the creaking floorboards and up through the soles of my imitation leather shoes. Again I can feel that rhythm even as I write, the slack and stress of it bringing vividly to mind my first attempt to write a poem. Washington’s Birthday coincided that year with the start of Lent, and a call from a local convent had gone out for poems on a Lenten theme. The prize for the best poem was to be ten dollars, and I set myself to winning that prize, both for itself and so that I could buy something for my mother’s thirty-fourth birthday. But how, I wondered, did one actually write a poem?
    My first step was to go up to Brother Clyde at his desk at the back of the study hall and ask for help. In the appendix to my blue-covered literature textbook, he explained, was a glossary of literary terms with a definition of the various metrical feet and a discussion of line lengths and rhyme forms. No matter that someone named Allen Ginsberg was making history in San Francisco with his chantlike, unrhymed Blakean verses and had already caused a mild stir with something called Howl. I do not believe anyone at the prep had yet heard of Ginsberg or his Howl, and in any event I would no more have been allowed to read that free-wheeling, free-verse poem than I’d been allowed to indulge myself with Andersonville. In the province in which I lived, poems, as my textbook informed me, had to rhyme.
    They also had to be marked by lines of metrically recurring feet, usually in units of four or five, though these units could be as short as one foot or contain as many as eight or more. If my textbook spoke of metrical shading and variation, I paid no attention, and wouldn’t have understood the meaning of those terms anyway. Besides, I’d just been pressed into service as an auxiliary drummer for the Marianist Prep’s ragtag Marching Band and at the moment had percussion on the brain. Stress, boom, stress, boom, stress boom stress. Like the atom in my physics textbook, I surmised, the foot was the building block of the world of the poem, and consisted primarily of a stressed syllable linked at either end to one or two (relatively) unstressed syllables.
    Leaving aside the problematic issue of the double-stressed spondee— BOOM BOOM!—no doubt invented by some troublemaker who couldn’t leave well enough alone, there were four possible kinds of feet, out of which the poet strung together poems the way a jeweler strung pearls on a string. There was the rising iambic foot, which went dah-DUM, and the mirror image of this called the trochee, a falling rhythm which went DUM-dah. Then there was the galloping anapest—dah,-dah-DUM, dah-dah-DUM—and, finally, the dactyl—DUM-dah-dah, DUM-dah-dah—which was supposed to approximate the quantitative measure of Greek and Latin epic and heroic verse, but which had degenerated in English into a comic form.
    For my poem I wisely chose the only option really open to me: the iambic foot. This, I decided, I would repeat seven times, a length I felt would give my effort a certain nobility and expansion. I also believed, since seven was a sacred number, that my line would then contain a shadow of the sublime. I decided on rhyming couplets, seven sets of these, adding up to fourteen, a sonnet of sorts in imitation of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, which my Lenten poem would commemorate.
    What I did not know at the time was that I was using the old fourteener or poulter’s measure, whose sevens naturally break into units of four feet and three. In other words, without knowing it, my first effort turned out to be a meditative ballad, based really on the old four-beat hymns—the best of them disturbingly written by Protestant divines—and which I found in the ubiquitous songbooks placed in the chapel pews. By using the poulter’s measure, I may have unwittingly tried to conceal the heretical origins of such music by writing in a form which seemed to approximate more closely the long open forms of the Gregorian chant which we sang daily at Matins and Vespers.
    My long lines would file smartly across the page, exactly as we postulants did whenever we marched off to mass or to the dining hall for meals. I set to work, then, following the story of the passion and death of Christ, including myself as actor in this mini-Oberammergau. There was of course a rich, two-thousand-year-old mythos behind the Passion which I could call upon, and—by way of mental reinforcement—there were all those colored pictures of the Way of the Cross tacked up in the study hall for Lent.
    Yet, in spite of my best intentions, after several hours the poem petered out two lines short of the fourteen required, and I found myself regrouping the twelve remaining into three squads of four, each with as much subtlety of movement as the forward charge of a Roman phalanx against entrenched resistance. At the top of the page I dedicated the poem, as I dedicated everything I wrote, to the Holy Family, then followed this with the title, “Forgive Me.” The poem itself was a confession of cowardice and backsliding in the face of the example of the carpenter from Nazareth. Moreover, it was filled with baroque (and redundant) singsong modifiers. Given all of that the lines I wrote were deeply and passionately meant. Here is what I managed:

I help to beat and scourge Your back a bloody crimson red
And place a crown of prickly thorns upon Your regal head.
Your sacred name and character I mock and ridicule.
O Lord each time I flee Your love I prove myself a fool.
I hurt and help to make You fall along the Dolor’s way,
And scorn Your mother and the others as they watch and pray. 
I strip Your garment from Your limbs and from Your whip-lashed skin.
Yes, all of this I do to You when I commit a sin.
I help to drive the ugly nails into Your feet and wrists,
And mock Your kingly deity with sland’rous waving fists.
Each time I sin against Thee, Lord, I help to break Your heart.
Lord, help me hate my sins and evermore from them depart!

When I stare at the lines, I can still hear a thin voice crying out of the dead past. It is a voice isolated, wounded, embarrassed, and yet determined. The words themselves, penned in purple thirty years ago, I keep now in a metal box along with my Nocturnal Adoration pin, bestowed for faithful attendance at a hundred benediction services, a fraternity pin, a college ring, as well as the letters my mother wrote me the year I was away at Beacon.
    In the course of writing out my poem, the beat of which I kept tapping out on my wooden desktop to make sure the words conformed to the unalterable law of stress, I managed to evoke most of the traditional images of the Passion on which the entire community had been meditating for weeks, at the same time adding just a hint of Poe’s doubtful masterpiece, “The Raven,” all of it wrapped up in the rhythms I’d gleaned from years of reading storebought birthday cards. I see too that the poem’s logic follows the form of an Ignatian meditation. There is the composition of place—here a grand guinol version of the Via Dolorosa, trombone crescendos and all—followed by a call for help, a word repeated five times in the poem. As in: Lord, help me get through this poem.
    My poem finished, I submitted it to my superiors, who in turn sent it on to the convent, and about a month afterward I learned I had won first prize. (It occurs to me now, though no one at the time said this, that my poem may in fact have been the only submission.) When the check for ten dollars arrived, I went to the storeroom which served as our religious goods store and bought modest gifts for everyone in my family, including a rosary for my mother. I had looked in a book, much as my father had taught me to look in his big, blue-backed automotive books whenever I needed to change a set of sparkplugs or an oil filter, and had learned to write a poem. And now that poem had won a prize.
    That it would take a lifetime of listening to the play of the wind through the shagged pines, the arhythmia of one’s self breathing, the phrasal modulations which constitute another’s unique voiceprint, and the shifts and jagged countershifts present in all sorts of music, from country to Buddy Holly to Bessie Smith to Mozart and Beethoven and Debussy and back to Charlie Bird Parker, as well as Catullus and Virgil, Dante and Chaucer, Keats and Whitman, Williams and Bishop and Berryman and Lowell, could not have occurred to me at the time. In the beginning, I heard and registered only the percussive beat of the marching drum, or the tic tic tic of an engine’s valves and pistons, both as sharp and defined as most ethical and moral issues were to me then, repeating as I had repeated so often in my mind the alternating iambic and anapestic imperatives of “thou SHALT, thou shalt NOT.”
    Flushed with success, I entered my second and last contest a month later. This one was held by the Marianists themselves for the best poem and best short story about the Order’s founder, Father Chaminade. With the hubris of the as-yet-unbested, I entered both contests, writing nothing less than a poetic epic, again in fourteeners (the poem seems mercifully to have disappeared), which focused on Fr. Chaminade’s rooftop escape from Paris with the Girondists in hot pursuit. My teeming brain as yet ungleaned, I afterward wrote an eleven-page historical novel based on Fr. Chaminade’s life. And though I was co-winner in both contests, having to share the prize was a bitter aspic for me. What I learned then was that, even among the forty of us, farmboys and all, there seemed to be plenty of talent to go around, and that the competition for prizes in the future was going to be far more formidable than anything I had yet imagined.
    Reading over one’s early poems, Stevens has written, can give one the creeps. Still, we have to begin somewhere, impelled forward as we are from nothing by nothing but a hope which may prove finally to have been ninety-nine percent illusion. Good writing always remains elusive, as elusive as trying to capture the precise outline of the aurora borealis as it flutters across the deep heavens on a summer’s night. True, angels cheer us from those vast heights, and sometimes we dream they perform fiery cartwheels for every fresh copulative we add to noun. Or, if it is not angels we envision, then perhaps a cosmic cheerleader going through her paces on a field of bronzen gold.
    More than thirty years have passed since Beacon, and many visions and many more revisions. Sometimes, especially when I feel the power of my body escaping from me as from a container, I am compensated by old images which seem to grow more vivid the more the past recedes. Such memories, I know, may be the glittering of false lights only, lights slightly curved and erotic. Sometimes these lights dart across my mind as across the night sky, against which are scrawled the huge symbols of a language I have never learned to read.
    But then the night condenses to a blackboard on which a little ball bounces gaily and I can just make out the fuzzy outline of the words to some old forgotten song. And soon I am following one of those old singalongs we used to watch on winter nights in the old study hall before everything disappeared. Beacon too was such a light, perhaps the strongest light I had till then been given. And by its light, intermittent as it may at times have been, I learned to stitch together words and meanings by which to warm myself—dah-dee-DUM, dah-dee-DVM—until such time as I could teach myself to sing.

Paul Mariani was born in New York City in 1940 and grew up there and on Long Island. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Manhattan College, a master’s from Colgate University, and a PhD from the City University of New York. He is the author of six poetry collections: Deaths & Transfigurations (Paraclete Press, 2005), The Great Wheel (W. W. Norton, 1996), Salvage Operations: New & Selected Poems (1990), Prime Mover (1985), Crossing Cocytus (1982), and Timing Devices (1979). He has published numerous books of prose, including Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (Viking, 2002), and God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable (University of Georgia Press, 2002). Other books include A Useable Past: Essays, 1973–1983 (1984), William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics (1975), and A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1970), as well as four biographies: The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (1999); Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (1994), both named New York Times Notable Books of the year; Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (1990); and William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981), which won the New Jersey Writers Award, was short-listed for an American Book Award, and was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the year. His latest biography, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (Viking) appeared in 2008. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2009, he received the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. He was the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught from 1968 until 2000, and currently holds a chair in poetry at Boston College. Mariani and his wife, Eileen, have three grown sons and live in western Massachusetts.

“Beginnings” appears in our Summer 1991 issue.