The true imago Dei.

Photo: my Dad in his library carrel at Duke, circa 1970. 

~

My sister Clare recently sent around a sheaf of poems written by Dad, out of the hundreds he wrote over the years he raised us, taught religion, and took care of Mom. This one, “Murph,” was published in the literary journal West Branch. It’s about Dad’s seminary friend who committed suicide after being rejected by a woman he loved. Somehow, to me, in the way only poetry can, it explains so much about Dad, about our Catholicism, about why I am the way I am.

~

in February I took a Greyhound
from Milwaukee to Galena
the year after Malcolm X was shot
to meet Coughlin at the DeSoto Hotel
in a room where they said
Lincoln once slept

in Washington Murph
rebuffed we heard by Marilyn
had just jumped off the Key Bridge
and washed up under M street
bloated with Potomac sludge
his brilliant argument

        in the humid tense classroom of McMahon Hall
        with the desperate Dominican
        teaching moral theology
        that love not reason
        desire not vision
        Scotus not Aquinas
        the Franciscan not the Dominican
        his sweet passion for the Marilyn
        he had not yet met
        not his stunningly lucid mind
        was the true imago Dei

finally done

none of us could keep up
with the way Murph followed his logic
to its conclusions
the word was he came on too fast
and she turned him out shielding
his ejaculatio praecox

Coughlin treated me to a turtle steak
in a restaurant next to the Mississippi
and said he thought suicide
was God’s way of saving Murph
from opposing him directly
which any fool could see
would be the result
of all the thinking

afterwards we broke trail
across a eight inch blanket of snow
gold in the late sun
over hills breasting gently
down toward the river

at a gray ruin
sticking out of the drifts
we sat talking
as long as I could stand
the cold slush in my shoes
about what we or anyone
might have done to help Murph
out of the strange place
he had thought himself into
where he didn’t know how
to come on to a real girl

warmed by the big bottle
of Jack Daniels
Coughlin pulled from his suitcase
I slept like a dead man that night
in a doomed man’s bed
and hungover
lectured thickly the next morning
the whole reason for the trip
on the gospel in Bellow’s Herzog
my master’s thesis in progress
to the Franciscans
and sweet coeds
budding out of their tight miniskirts
at Clinton College
distracted by Murph’s last trick
how he proved
the sweating Dominican right

~

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