Auto-da-fé

Cruel as the grave
you said of jealousy
that night you were even crueler,
when I came to you still
in the winding sheet. And you,
bringing resurrection like a trial,
like the fireball Jesus rides on
in the Grünewald Resurrection:
you ask more of the faithful
than any god would ask, a savior
like an inquisition, a Christ of napalm,
killing villages to save them,
and I your converted Jew,
your reclaimed gook.

Artist’s Statement

B reakthrough? Perhaps I can’t go that far, but “Auto-da-fé” represents, in short space, some of the leading attributes of my work in poetry over the last two decades, and this may be the first poem where I “got it right”—all in a compact and compelling package. Biblical allusion and religious symbolism play a large part in my work, even if sometimes, as in Faulkner, this symbolism points up just how little spirituality has to do with modern life or how modern people live it. Another important feature of this poem is the use of works of art to create metaphorical connections. Poet A. E. Stallings has remarked on the recurrent use of ekphrasis in my verse—that is, the attempt to describe, in words, a work or works in other media, most often the visual arts. However, I didn’t set out consciously to be an ekphrastic poet; it just sort of happened that familiar paintings conveyed certain images to me that could broaden the meaning of my verse.

Besides these two important elements, “Auto-da-fé” was able to capture in brief the existential angst that I guess everybody feels from time to time in the course of a romantic attachment. I continued to explore this feeling in other ways in a collection entitled The Geometry of Loneliness. So “Auto-da-fé” represents a way of looking at the world through poetry that I went on to develop in much of my later work. A watershed poem, then, for certain.