Phoenix Poets

New and Selected Poems

Michael Collier

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226795393
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A collection of poetry spanning the career of distinguished poet Michael Collier.
 
Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, a friendship with a disgraced Catholic bishop, his father's encounter with Charles Lindbergh, Lebanese beekeepers, a mother's sewing machine, or a piano in the woods, he does so with the syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and a flawless ear that has made him one of America's most distinguished poets. These poems cross expanses, connecting the fear of missing love and the bliss of holding it, the ways we speak to ourselves and language we use with others, and deep personal grief and shadows of world history. The Missing Mountain brings together a lifetime of work, chronicling Collier's long and distinguished career as a poet and teacher. These selections, both of previously published and new poems, chart the development of Collier's art and the cultivations of his passions and concerns.
 

from My Bishop and Other Poems (2018)

Meadow

Moments that were tender—if I can use that word—now rendered in memory’s worn face, have names attached and, less vivid, places that are more frequented than present places. Four decades is not so long ago, when facing an open window, hands braced against the sill (moonlight on her back) and, outside, grass in furrows,or so it seems to me who’s never left for long that window or looked much beyond the meadow and yet have continually wondered what she was looking at, having never, as far as I can see, looked back.

My Bishop

• The summer of high school graduation I felt God was calling me to the priesthood.
• What I mean by “calling” is not that he spoke to me in a language I understood but that he had given me access to immense and ecstatic experiences of love and joy, not real experiences but ones I perceived as if a limitless future was inside me, as if, and this is why it seemed like a “calling,” I was
  being invited to see the world that lay behind and beyond the one we are born into.
• I began to kneel in my bedroom and pray, not prayers I had been taught but rather ones that inhabited me and for which I was their instrument.
• Sometimes as I prayed the sun would come down out of the sky and compress into a flower.
• Sometimes people I did not know materialized in the room and prayed with me, and how glad and comforted I was by that intimacy.
• Sometimes the prayers were like violent caresses and I would masturbate.
• I was eighteen and wanting to live a life filled with meaning, I wrote one of my Jesuit High School teachers about entering the Order.
• What he told me was that I should listen not to the voice coming from inside me or the voice from the world beyond but I should listen to the voice coming from the physical world.

• He said, God is immanent, everywhere, open, and available.

---

· · ·

• Bishop, my first thought when I saw you enter the funeral home chapel for my father’s Rosary was that you peroxide your hair and then as you came nearer how little changed by time your face seemed, except a single bangle of a double chin, but no age lines, no grotesque enlargement of ears and
  nose, just a smooth, worriless, mild, unreadable, Irish countenance and that gingery hair, incongruous in a man so plain.
• A fondness for you stirred in me not as a kind of pity for what you’d become but for what I realized you’d always been: a short, insecure man with a compassionate heart, proficient at following directions but lacking the common touch—and whose timidity was now a form of cowardice?

---

· · ·

• What a beautiful detail, what a fine recollection to nudge me with in front of my father’s coffin—that you watched the Smothers Brothers for the first time when my parents invited you for a Sunday dinner.
• Was remembering that show a way of getting a conversation going after forty years, a quick nod to something we’d shared and then on to the real subject?
• And what would that have been, the real subject?
• What I remember is that you let my father celebrate alone the sacrament of cocktail hour, the way he did most nights: on the counter a bar towel folded just so on which to rest a long, small stirring spoon, its handle topped with a ceramic cherry.
• Drink in hand, paper coaster at the ready, he’d watch the news, while from the hallway a gilt-framed, papal marriage blessing with its holy-card cameo of Pius XII admonished him.
• In our house nothing was done without the Pope looking on, like the time semi–in flagrante on the living room floor with a girl I looked up and there he was, Papa, in his white zucchetto.

---

· · ·

• For your episcopal motto you chose “To Build Up the Body of Christ,” apt for the once young, friendly priest and team chaplain, who lifted weights at the Universal Gym next to the K-Mart onWest Indian School Road, who never stopped reminding us to play fair, who even in his cassock could
  dribble, fake, and set a shot, or spiral a football, and whose wry, almost cheerful expression met us in the sacristy when, as Knights of the Altar, we’d flip on the white row of switches that lighted up the church, flooding the dark processionary of the nave, reflecting off the cold floor of polished
  stone like the bottom of a stream, a fine relief of gray blue, gravel and pebbles—the light all at once expelling the shadows, the vacant spaces that left me calm, certain of purpose, as I filled cruets with wine and water, slipping the folded, starched purificator between the crystal vessels
  on their glass tray, while you vested, whispering in Latin: “Gird me, O Lord, with the cincture of purity, and quench in my heart the fire of concupiscence, that the virtue of continence and chastity may abide in me.”
• So many snippets of prayers, spells of liturgy, Latin and English, parables and miracles—the coal we lit to burn the incense; the clang of the chain against the thurible; bowing, genuflecting, crossing ourselves—all of it abides in me still, serene now, vivid in the radiance of my disbelief.

---

· · ·

• And while the fire in your heart had been quenched, it was not so for the other assistant pastor, Robert B. Gluch, who had charge of the Knights.
• Twenty-eight of us in cassocks and surplices, hands steepled as we stood tiered on the altar steps, Gluch not quite in the center at the back, taller by a head, and wearing an ornate cape with a clasp.
• Four of us with closed eyes, six of us smirking, including myself.
• McDonogh and Braun eyeless behind the reflected glare on their spectacles.
• Gluch beatific, head tilted, a male Mary.

---

· · ·

• When my mother saw my father laid out in his rented casket, she asked, in her deaf-person’s, loud sotto voce, “Who did that to Bob?” And then, “He looks awful!”
• And yet, Bishop, for you, she was all false kindness.
• “How did you find us?” she wanted to know, as if your presence was both mystery and miracle, and then through the cloud of her dementia, she asked it again, then again and again.
• And so, with my mother perseverating and with the waxworks version of my father behind us, and gathered all around—my wife and children, my sisters, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces, my parents’ nona- and octogenarian friends, my dearest childhood friends gathered all around ...
  you turned from her, as if she wasn’t speaking, to ask if I was “right with the church,” and then because “it would p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• from My Bishop and Other Poems (2018)
• from An Individual History (2012)
• from Dark Wild Realm (2006)
• from The Ledge (2000)
• from The Neighbor (1995)
• from The Folded Heart (1989)
• from The Clasp (1986)
• New Poems (2021)
• Notes