The Needle's Eye Read online

  God kept dying and rising again, just as the sun does. God died on a stick with sunset colors trapped in its bark, and on the fields of Europe and Asia, Africa and Georgia. The wine of God became a sacrament that lasted for centuries. It was dye, a hen’s feather, and the hair of a brown donkey. God was a body made of matter in space and on earth. It burnt its own light like a camera and floated on a Hindu ghat.

  In the state of highest poverty: an animal is not considered property but an object of common use. Like a woman. I hope I am still here to see the poor inherit the earth, because they will, they will! I already see them rising, throwing down their tools, and marching. God was color and time, but its brooding attaché was ever invisible though it lies down on every corner to this day.

  Poverty almost always means servitude. An animal, if allowed, lives by its senses and does its work for food, and Francis of Assisi advised us animals to keep other animals safe from harm because he was one of us, a beast.

  Virgin girls from Peshawar to Norway have lived in fear of marauding and raping men, of enslavement, being trafficked and domesticated, but some found a way to live secretly, taking care of their parents and living like pets who slept on the floor and followed the shadows while clearing the table.

  One of them had no parents and founded houses for endangered adolescents. Her childhood made her. A home that was not her birth home, but home to plants, spices, oaks, flowers, and animals. She was an arrested infant still playing with her cloak. From one piece of cloth you can learn everything. From dolls, sticks and stones and water, the same.

  Later, she was determined to rescue girls from the hilarities of men and let them grow in peace with books, paints, music, metal-working, glassblowing, cave drawing, mechanical engineering, and bookbinding. This is not a lie.

  Like Clare, she starved from lack of food and lay down several times a day as if her bones were glass and she worked in a furnace.

  The time of the butterflies and fairies that followed the apparitions of gods in the fog and spectral strangers, is gone. These lost creatures were memorialized in paintings and children’s stories as little people. The nymphs played with Persephone by the side of the sea, then became Thumbelina with a leaf for a boat, and dragon flies for companions.

  Did you know that Puritans believed a baby was only conceived during an orgasm? The Puritans had to spend a lot of time on making this happen, on sex, because without more children, there would be no settlement, no city.

  You can shoot and kill a deer; you can bomb a farm, and be punished for it. But rape is the worst crime of all because it perverts orgasm, brings pleasure to the rapist alone, and has no hope in it. Rape attacks an area of the body that is sacred, an opening to eternity.

  After the rape of Persephone, it seems the animals broke apart into mortals, millions of them pounding around as near-apes and hairless weaklings who only had words.

  We sometimes say we have met a saint because of the unnatural and unselfish nature of an act performed. The nature of the saint is never to ask anything for herself and to be impersonal. An animal.

  How strange it is to grow from childhood, to have to discard your clothes, now tight and short, like Alice to find yourself bending where once you were tiny. To rise higher than the knees of your father, to watch your fingers and shoes lengthen.

  I have to say I never got over my shock that there is a world and it is living.

  I will die, but who will meet me on the other side? The mad prepubescent child, brain damaged at birth, neurologically distraught, who still haunts the public parks and subways, or languishes in an institution. I saw these children on the heath in London among winter flowers like lumps of sugar china.

  The story of Ferdinand the Bull is an example of highest poverty, with an animal choosing to lie down in the natural world rather than strut among men and wounded bulls. Exhibiting force was of no interest to him, and he only exploded once, like a child in an electric chair, when he sat on a bee.

  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to die inside a massive prison because of his awful act that killed a child. You’re not serious when you’re seventeen, Rimbaud said in his poem “Romance.” This is the merciless world we are in.

  The first declaration of the rights of children was only available to adults. Then one day in India, a teacher opened her pupils’ eyes to the rights that existed on their behalf.

  These were: the rights to food and shelter, a parent, education and health care, and most importantly, the right to a name. The children were delighted. And then the teacher corrected herself and said they should not be called rights in fact, but expectations and she gazed like a far-seeing hound out the window.

  Convents and monasteries renamed the children when they came in, so they would be safe from angry uncles, fiancés, fundamentalists, and brothers. Often siblings of the same sex followed each other into sanctuaries out of fear more than faith.

  Sometimes the girls avoided having any marks that would identify them. So they changed their names, and their relatives couldn’t find and drag them away. They walked around and around with shawls (like transitional objects and the blankets babies love), covering themselves so only God could recognize and select them.

  They sewed bags to contain themselves and their dreams; the needles were like the first safety pins. The brothers moved outside in packs with arrows that flew by day, more suicidal than the sisters, more ready to die, more full of ideology and drama. Sometimes they pillaged and plundered the places where the girls lived. Sometimes they ran through their houses like the wild boars they once were: autistic, schizophrenic, bipolar, stoned.

  Sometimes they shot each other in a friendly way. Sometimes the boys had their jaws shot off, or an arm thrown into a ditch, or they had to hide inside boats and railroad cars, as if they couldn’t die even if they wanted. They covered their heads and faces.

  The body is the mind.

  Some were imprisoned, humiliated, and ordered around. The free boys squatted like armies inside cities and on farms, on distant Caucasian mountains and in the Philippines.

  Those children who were caught still exist with filthy tears on their cheeks, damp and dribbling in a dark and punitive prison, and they still dream of double suns and skateboarding along the Charles River. Sometimes they sing and write poems in prison.

  Still, hope was a like a throng of singers that circled the world both here and there having died and echoed over and over. What is a song but a call from the other side?

  The day I felt the old soldiers clawing at the soles of my feet in Cambridge Common, I realized that history is the top god of the secular world. And the lesser gods are police lights, pharmacists, a finish line, a scoreboard, a doctor, and a nurse. And maybe it’s not God who has been disappearing for slow centuries, but the human being, the vague figure we have projected onto gods and clouds.

  We say the gods died. But what if we are the ones who died and this narrative is only repeating our dying, our rising, and our shame?

  Why else shed our skins when we are walking?

  Weren’t we made to be seen?

  What we are looking for is what is looking.

  —Francis of Assisi

  Acknowledgments

  Many of these prose pieces and poems were published in various publications including the Economy, Golden Handcuffs, Let the Bucket Down, Poetry Review (UK), Religion and the Arts (volume 14, issue 5), Boston One Box, the Straddler, and Exact Change.

  Portions of the collection were taken from papers I delivered at Boston College for The Guestbook Project in 2009; at the 2012 Conference in Angers, France, for the AFEA (French Association for American Studies); at the University of Poitiers; at San Francisco State in the George Oppen Lecture Series; at the Holloway Reading Series at UC Berkeley; at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion; at a symposium at Yale University titled “Poetry and Mysticism”; and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Much gratitude is also due to those who invited me to speak at these conferences a
nd reading series over the past seven years.

  The privilege of going to Italy twice, spending one day of my life in Rome, many months in Ireland and England, two visits to France, one to Berkeley, two to New Haven and at the Woodberry Room—is all thanks to those who invited me. And even though I don’t know who chose me for an Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, I thank you for that marvelous surprise.

  Many and special thanks to Jeff Shotts for his patient reading of the manuscript, to Katie Dublinski and to all the staff at Graywolf. My thanks to Askold Melnyczuk and Cole Swensen and Carolyn Forché for inviting me to teach during those seven years; to Sheila Gallagher who made the video Brigid of Murroe with me; to the Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellowship and Christina Davis who helped me complete my videos while I wrote this book.

  The cover images are drawn from my short video-in-progress called Embryonic, edited by Maceo Senna: an homage to Ali Khamraev’s film The Man Who Loved the Birds.

  Fanny Howe is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life, and Radical Love: Five Novels. Her most recent collection of poetry, Second Childhood, was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award, and her work in fiction was recognized as a finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. She received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement, and she has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. She lives in New England.

  The text of The Needle’s Eye is set in Adobe Garamond Pro. Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.