Gerard Manley Hopkins

At the mention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mild-mannered father

— tender, abstracted — would exercise the right

to revert to type. That is to say: devout; that is, proscriptive. He would rather

we did not so bandy the good Jesuit’s name about

in talk of “gay this” and “gay that” — just as he would rather

my sister did not, from the library, request “sick” Lolita.

Like tars on a stage deck, yo ho, we roll our eyes.

Somebody snaps on the poisonous gas-fired heater

— and I put off a year or two the hypothesis

I’ll form, with a wave, to provoke him to these wobblers

that all in such matters swing from pole to pole;

as Hopkins was wont (his muse being bi[nsey] po[p]lar[s])

to swing from joy’s heights, alas, to the abyss

and for whom the mind had “mountains; cliffs of fall.”

 

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there....    ” Who’s not known the hell

that fashions itself from the third night without sleep — 

the third or the fourth — in whose black margins crawl

shrill horrors, and where breathless, poleaxed, pinned

 — as though in the teeth of an outrageous gale — 

the mind — sick — preys upon the stricken mind.

And “worst, there is none” — no none — than this wild grief:

Citalopram-wired. Our sweating selves self-cursed.

Oh, “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?”

as Hopkins wrote — but, far gone, at its worst

it’s her first form I want. Please stroke my hair.

It’s alright now. I’m here, I’m here. There, there.