The Papa Sonnets: Songs of Unbelief

Thirty years ago I visited the old Museum of Modern art in New York with my lifelong best friend, Robert Stacy, the one I lost my religion with some thirty years before. That afternoon in the cafe-basement of the MOMA, our talk drifted to religion. I'd been a Catholic for fifteen years even though the bulk of Christian mythology and theology remained implausible to me. I was in a state of befuddled openness, and he reminded me of the disappointed idealism of of our seventeenth year, our shifting of the burden of proof onto God. 

      A poem based on this conversation, "The Papa Sonnets," was so personal I never submitted it for publication (I've published over a hundred and submitted more), the sole copy buried in stacks of yellowing manuscripts. The speaker in the poem caricatures of my friend as a surrogate for myself, and the tone is satirical. I emailed a copy to him, and he, of course, recognized "the substitution or exchange of My Father who art in Heaven with my father who art on McKinley Avenue. (Through dense and obtuse poetic imagery.)" The poem is written in the unrhymed sonnet form that I practiced in the 1980s. Obtuseness wasn't my intent, so his comment suggests that this tightly wound wrestling bout needs explication.

      Long ago when I was a student, New Critical orthodoxy demanded "close reading" of the words on the page. A poem was an objet d'art, not a projection of the poet's will. Best laid plans gone agley don't count. True to that tradition, my explication will stick to the words on the page.

THE PAPA SONNETS 

                  1.

This is my plan. I will pout

Until old SkyDad hurls down

Assurances, terrified

Of my red squall, my toothy scar--

But what if he's a timid

Laundry route delivery man,

Busy at dawn, home early

To drink beer, fiddle with vertical,

Contrast, brightness, powerless

To rescript? 
                      What can he promise,

Terrified himself of the one-eyed

Strike that made us, serpent in

Its thicket under a belly button

Even he has, badge of the Mother?

                        2.

If I hold my breath until the Him of hymns

Administers mouth-to-mouth, will this

Nursery me, staunch the white

Burning of hair, knobbed fingers,

Depletion? 
                    I will not humor

With lying deo gratias

For birthday-wrapped scorpions,

But hold out. 
                        What if he whispered,

"OK, son, you've worn me down.

Here's proof, assurances, wings,"

And I was singing "How great thou art,"

Went to my rot-hole (I thought) not

Hearing? 
                 No. It's too important:

Assurances for this little corpse. 

      The poem uses a kind of vocabulary substitution called kenning in Old English poetry, where  the sea is the "whale-road" and blood is "battle-sweat." In the first stanza, "SkyDad" means "father in Heaven," the low diction implying a discredited God-image. "Red squall," following "pout," describes a child, his face turning red as he screams through the "toothy scar" of his mouth. Squall, a storm at sea such as Jesus calmed in three gospels, suggests delusions of grandeur. The child-man imagines he is a force of nature and his misbehavior might force a miracle. Red and scar both suggest injury. The child-man feels wounded by God's refusal to provide him with "assurances" (presumably of His existence, of eternal life, and of moral order). 

      The literal meaning of the stanza is that the child-man plans to withhold belief until his doubt wears down the Father. Imagery of a maladapted brat shows that this isn't a mature strategy--that if a man (such as me or my friend) were indeed feeling wounded by loss of the Father of childhood belief, there might be more reasonable alternatives: perhaps going full atheist or moving toward a more adult God-image than SkyDad. The poem only implies these alternatives, but the infant imagery suggests the need to move to something like them.

      The rest of Part 1 wrestles with the entangling of God the Father with mortal fathers, the problematic nature of father in the context of mother. I reference my friend's father, an educated but indecisive man who delivered laundry while his wife founded businesses and was active in civil rights. Father is a problematic God-name in households dominated by mothers. The traditional sense contradicts experience. The first six lines of the stanza confront this problem, conflating Father in Heaven with this passive father. A passive deity watching a cause-effect universe (the TV) where shows are pre-scripted can only adjust the picture, powerless to change the mother-script and "terrified" at his subjection to the mater. 

      A father's sole necessary contribution to human creation is an orgasm inside a mother, "the one-eyed strike that made us," wholly dependent on the availability, fertility, and nurturing of mater-matter. Strike signifies the brevity of the act--the one eye the eye-shaped opening in the glans. The father contributes only a microscopic sperm that vanishes into the ovum, after which human matter is all mater. Only in blind patriarchy can father be an apt metaphor for creator. Mother works better, given that virgin birth occurs in many species but is inconceivable in a male. Add to this the influence of intrauterine conditions, and the idea of a father-source is laughable. He has good reason to be terrified. The rest of the Part 1 emphasizes this. The father's creative word (if any) is his phallus: "serpent in its thicket under [subordinate to] the belly button." The "badge of the mother" recalls his umbilical tie to mater, his own contingent being.

      Part 2 returns to the child-man's fantasy that if he refuses to acknowledge the father-god of childhood religion, holds his breath, he may somehow force that figure to reveal himself. Again, a compulsive hope that the supreme father exists is expressed in a refusal of faith, a passive-aggressive sulk. Kennings abound in this section. The "Him of hymns," the Father in church liturgy, echoes "King of kings," famous from Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." Mouth-to-mouth combines kissing--acknowledging the child-man's sonship as the father does the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:20)--with resuscitation, a figure of hoped-for resurrection to eternal life. This resuscitating kiss would return the child-man to reborn life (thus nursery-ing him), "staunching" (through the hope of resurrection) the effects of aging: hair degenerating ("burning") to white, rheumatoid arthritis, and loss of strength and endurance ("depletion").

      In the second part of Part 2, the child-man repeats his resolve to remain agnostic, not to honor a hidden god he paradoxically imagines as existing. He will refuse gratitude (deo gratias) to the creator of a world that inflicts sickness and death every year ("birthday wrapped scorpions"), but will hold out for assurances of a better deal. He explains this by imagining that his pouting might indeed provoke an epiphany and the father deliver proof (of his existence) and assurances of  heaven ("wings"). What if (the child-man worries) he drowned out this epiphany with bogus (because unsure) praise of the hidden god ("How great thou art")? Then he would go hopeless to his grave--to his rot-hole for all he knew. He rejects this. It is too important to him to escape alive from his depressing sense of  living as a dying "corpse" (corpus: "body").

(I won't revise the above because it reflected my honest impression, but I've discovered (01/12/2021) a copy of the poem published in the Spring 1988 issue of the journal +R. Credit is hereby given.)