Poetry & the Pope

 I’ve been thinking about poetry a lot lately. I’ve been teaching poetry and the writing of literary essays about poetry in my lit classes, and my creative writing students have been working on their own poetry. I’ve been struggling, trying to explain why poetry matters, how it’s different from any other form of writing, where poets come up with the subjects of their poems & why they bother. I have loads of teacherly answers to these questions, and I love to listen to the discussion these questions can generate in a classroom. But honestly, I don’t know. Not ANY of it. And I’m not being evasive, or snobbish (as in, I know but can’t possibly tell YOU), or falsely self-deprecating—the befuddled writer who’s secretly in Stage 4 of Buddhahood. I seriously just don’t know.

Here’s a good example. At the same time Pope John Paul II was on his deathbed, I was down for the count with a brutal case of bronchitis. I lay in a recliner, wrapped in a sleeping bag, watching CNN’s 24/7 coverage of the Pope’s eminent demise. For three days (seriously…THREE days), I wandered in & out of a fever delirium, waking occasionally in a hazy fog, with some tidbit of news about the Pope drifting into my brain like a dream. At one point, I woke briefly to hear a physician commentator explain why the Pope was having difficulty breathing (I was a symphony of bronchial wheezing & coughing myself at that time) and I KNEW in that momentary, cosmic way of delirium, that the Pope and I were ONE…united in a crazy Vulcan mind (and pulmonary) meld. He drifted in & out of my consciousness after that, in a surreal, fever-induced slideshow.

But here’s the really weird part: my fever & brain fog finally broke when the Pope died. I’m not Catholic, and I hadn’t given ANY Pope a second thought before then. Still, this feeling stuck with me—the feeling that my buddy John Paul and I had had a moment. It stewed for a few months, and then this poem spilled out, nearly complete...

MARCH 31, 2005: MEDITATIONS IN EIGHT

Midway through a 104-degree

delirium I wake briefly

in sudden profound joy

to the certainty

that John Paul and I

bed-bound feverish brethren

are steeped in a mind meld—

I drift off again.

Illuminated in scarlet

weightless now

we pirouette

in a breathless dervish

lungs laboring in thick air

above a blue fog chasm

that separates the living

from the dead.

Stunned by the

silence, the grace

of this dance, my clever

thoughts hang in blue blue blue 

air, like a useless bridge.

I grin my schoolgirl grin

and he names me

Only Love.

Two days later the fever breaks

he whirls on without me

I click back into clever

and must not speak of this

how I know I’ve been sick

how I know I’ve been cured

above a foggy precipice

by love, only love.

So there it is. I know what got the ball rolling, but I still don’t know where the poem came from, why, what it all means, whether or not it matters. It's all a big fat mystery to me. And I’m fine not knowing. 

As a side note, I learned long after his death that the Pope had been a poet in his younger years. Go figure…