"Entering Saint Patrick’s Cathedral" by Malachi Black

I have carried in my coat, black wet / with rain.

Support Poem-a-Day February 3, 2020   Entering Saint Patrick's Cathedral Malachi Black I have carried in my coat, black wet with rain. I stand. I clear my throat. My coat drips. The carved door closes on its slow brass hinge. City noises— car horns, bicycle bells, the respiration of truck engines, the whimpering steel in midtown taxi brakes—bend in through the doorjamb with the wind then drop away. The door shuts plumb: it seals the world out like a coffin lid. A chill, dampened and dense with the spent breath of old Hail Marys, lifts from the smoothed stone of the nave. I am here to pay my own respects, but I will wait: my eyes must grow accustomed to church light, watery and dim. I step in. Dark forms hunch forward in the pews. Whispering, their heads are bowed, their mouths pressed to the hollows of clasped hands. High overhead, a gathering of shades glows in stained glass: the resurrected mingle with the dead and martyred in panes of blue, green, yellow, red. Beneath them lies the golden holy altar, holding its silence like a bell,  and there, brightly skeletal beside it,  the organ pipes: cold, chrome, quiet but alive with a vibration tolling out from the incarnate source of holy sound. I turn, shivering back into my coat. The vaulted ceiling bends above me like an ear. It waits: I hold my tongue. My body is my prayer. Copyright © 2020 by Malachi Black. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.   "How much of God's power lies in God's silence? In the penetrating essay 'Silence and the Poet,' George Steiner posits that '[w]hat lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God.' For Steiner, the boundaries of speech are manifest in 'three other modes of statement—light, music, and silence,' which, in reaching beyond language, together '[give] proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world.' These may indeed be the limits of discourse—and thus, the exhaustion of speech, which, per Steiner, constitutes 'the core of man's mutinous relations to the gods'—but what are the limits of God? This poem plays with an inversion of Steiner's thought." —Malachi Black Malachi Black is the author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). He teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in San Diego, California. Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) "Shed" by Amber Flora Thomas read more "Homecoming Cistern Alien Vessel" by Gabrielle Calvocoressi  read more Thanks to Roger Reeves, author of King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read an extended Q&A about Reeves' curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year. Make a one-time contribution to help us publish Poem-a-Day.   Make your support go further by enrolling in monthly giving and joining the Mug Club! Copyright © 2020 The Academy of American Poets, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane St #901 New York, NY 10038 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.