Free The Best American Poetry 2012 by David Lehman Page B

Franciscan.
    In her small office, at the Cenacle Retreat House,
    right off Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida,
    I began my story—
    it was an interview, much of life is an interview.
    She said I did not need to pay her, but donations,
    yes, donations were appreciated:
    they could be left anonymously in a plain white envelope
    that she could take back to the cloister.
    She was dressed in a turtleneck and a denim jumper.
    She could have been mistaken in a grocery store for an aging housewife.
    My meetings with her went on for a few years.
    I had come to speak about Durell.
    I did not know how to end sentences about Durell.
    He had taught me—what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror?
    What? There were so many ways to end my sentence.
    He was an unlikely candidate for so many things.
    Outside, it was always some subtle variation of summer.
    I paused, then spoke urgently, not wanting to forget some fact,
    but much I knew I would forget or remember in a way my own,
    which would not exactly be correct, no, not exactly.
    Durell was dead, I said, and I needed to make sense of things.
    Sister Ann’s face was open, fragile—
    parts were chipped as on a recovered fresco.
    Above her gray head,
    a garish postcard of the Emmaus scene,
    the colors off, as if painted by numbers, with no concern for shading—
    the style of it had an unoriginal Catholic institutional uniformity.
    There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame.
    It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples,
    one named Cleopas, the other anonymous,
    forever mumbling Christ’s name, and with them,
    the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger.
    They were on their way to that town, Emmaus,
    seven miles out from Jerusalem,
    gossiping about the impress of Christ’s vanishing—
    they argued about whether to believe what they had seen;
    they were restless, back and forth the debate went—
    when there is estrangement there is little peace.
    II.
    Every time we met, Sister Ann prayed first.
    At times, my recollections blurred or a presumption would reverse.
    Sister Ann told me Durell was with me still,
    in a more intimate way than when he lived.
    She frequently lost her equilibrium, as older people sometimes do,
    before settling into her worn-out chair
    where she listened to me, week after week.
    The day I met Durell, I said, the morning light was clear,
    startling the town with ornament.
    The steeple of Christ Church held the horizon in place,
    or so I imagined, as if it had been painted first
    with confident amounts of titanium white
    before the rest was added. Trees clattered.
    The reiterating brick puzzle of Cambridge brightened—
    Mass Avenue, Mount Auburn, Dunster, Holyoke—
    proclaimed a new September, and new students trudged the streets.
    Every blood-warm structure was defined in relief.
    Hours before, while the moon’s neck wobbled on the Charles
    like a giraffe’s, or the ghost of a giraffe’s neck,
    I imagined Durell labored, having slept only a few hours,
    caged in his worries of doctor bills, no money,
    and running out of people to ask for it:
    mulling over mistakes, broken love affairs—
    a hospital orderly, a man upstairs,
    he probably mumbled unkind epithets about blacks and Jews,
    even though the men he loved were blacks and Jews.
    Some of his blasphemies, if you want to call them that,
    embarrassed me in front of Sister Ann,
    but she seemed unflappably tolerant.
    At sixty, he was unemployable.
    He had taught school and guarded buildings,
    each job ending worse than the last.
    His refrain was always: “It is not easy being an impoverished aristocrat.”
    He spoke with the old Harvard accent,
    I can still hear it, I will probably always hear it,
    with New York City, the North Shore and the army mixed in,
    the a ’s broadened, the r ’s were flat, the t ’s snapped—
    so a sentence would calibrate to a confident close,
    like “My dee-ah boy, that is that. ”
    He