That Old-Time Religion
for Allen Ginsberg
What would happen if we surrendered silence,
filled the negative space with song? All of us,
voices joined singing, “Glory, Glory Hallelujah”?
Or, “Imagine There’s No Heaven”?
Or, “Oops, I Did It Again”?
We sit in polite pews,
embarrassed by our warbling voices;
passively consuming
the catechism of song.
We, who listen silently to radios,
who fail to dance in kitchens.
We, whose album covers gather ornamental dust,
What prayers for us
whose sin is silence?
What prayers for us
who use heartbreak as furnishing?
When I was young I clothed myself
in violence and poverty,
and my voice grew hoarse,
fading wheeze in the night
This business of salvation
has never happened in stillness.
This has always been a parable
of pilgrimage and transformation.
1927: Hoagy Carmichael quits his law practice
and moves to California to play piano,
plucking melodies from the night to save his soul;
1929: Eleanora Fagan brings her heartbreak
to a Harlem stage, turns the violence of her youth
to song, reinvents herself as Billie Holiday.
1931: Young Robert Johnson,
who can play harmonica but not guitar,
makes a deal at the crossroads, but not with The Devil
And somewhere the boy I was
has calcified to stone.
And somewhere the boy I was
fails to pick up a guitar.
What if every voice, on every street, in every country
joined together in one nameless song?
Surely that would replicate
the horns that shattered Jericho’s walls.
And the somewhere the boy I was
retreats further and further into silence
And somewhere the boy I was
vanishes into masonry.
What is The Devil, but what remains
when pieces of us vanish into night;
that bitter twitch when “Rehab” plays;
Mark David Chapman’s cooling gun?
And somewhere the boy I was
fails to disturb the universe.
How are those voices anything but Holy,
those melodies that fill a chasm?
Lena Horne and Elliott Smith,
Richie Valens and MCA
— amen —
all inflections
in a voice that starts in silence
and explodes in a Bang,
in a Word,
in life.
All of them cracks
in the Jericho
between us all.
And somewhere the boy I was
inherits his uncle’s old Stones and Cream albums,
devours them in a binge.
And somewhere the boy I was
snags his mother’s copy of “Double Fantasy”
and doesn’t fast-forward through the Yoko Ono songs.
And somewhere the boy I was
slams his body in the heat of a pit
and finds a strange salvation.
So why is it that
when we raise the lights
and talk plainly of God,
none of us are happy?
Victor D. Infante is a poet, editor and journalist living in Worcester. He is the editor of the online literary journal, Radius: Poetry From the Center to the Edge, and the author of City of Insomnia, a poetry collection from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have been published in numerous periodicals, including The Collagist, Pearl, Chiron Review and The Nervous Breakdown.
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