James Penha

​
​A Prose Poem About Dark
 
There are too many poems about light. —Diane Seuss, “Coda”
 
I admit we quaked when the bolt burst bright just above the windshield illuminating him for me and me for him enough for us to recognize we kept our love naked in the dark because it just felt so right.
 
**
 
Spinning
 
I think of my lover’s madness as an evil elf, a Rumpelstiltskin demanding not his first born but his thralldom. I know the imp’s name. I call it out: Paranoia! but it does not disappear because my lover does not say it or stay: my lover disappears from me.
 
**
 
Once Popular
 
“The prolific and once popular writer James T. Farrell (1904-1979) is perhaps best known for his Studs Lonigan trilogy.”
Penn Libraries, University of Pennsylvania
 
I carried boxes of his papers from New York to the University of Pennsylvania and sifted, for my research, through those already deposited. When I visited him for the first time in his small upper East Side Manhattan apartment, he offered me a tuna salad sandwich—not what I expected from the novelist who inspired a generation of Mailers and Vonneguts. James T. Farrell! Studs Lonigan! Chicago’s Joyce. In his 70s he was thrilled that this young PhD candidate was thrilled by him. Historic, he would say of my chapters. Can you deliver this carton of my papers to Penn? Of course. Of course. I was at the Hilton as was Mailer and I. B. Singer at the banquet for Farrell’s fiftieth book! And then nothing. Silence after I sent him the final draft of my dissertation. Silence. As with those who criticized his contempt for Stalin, Farrell was famous for his feuds. Silence for me. Because I had mentioned how he had institutionalized his intellectually disabled child? Maybe. An unnecessary footnote, I lambasted myself, on one page! Silence. So silent. The dissertation went forward. I had to defend my rationale for focusing on a writer considered marginal by the professors interrogating me. Nonetheless, I earned my degree. But I missed my acquaintance with James T. Farrell, the active expression of my reverence for him, an icon I remember almost alone now in my own 70s.
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**
 
Cursively
 
The nun was young, I recall, and attractive, I thought, and seemed devoted to us, her sixteen catechism students on released time from public elementary school for an hour each Wednesday. The Baltimore Catechism: Question 1: Who made the world? Answer: God made the world. Question 6: Why did God make you? Answer: God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven. But the Catechism didn’t include prayers in its pages, and Sister needed to teach us the “Our Father.” So one Wednesday she distributed to each of us a yellow legal pad page on which she had written the “Our Father” by hand. Not a mimeographed page, not a dittoed page, and, of course, not a photocopy because Xerox wouldn’t come along for another four years. Like the monks and scribes before her, Sister had copied the “Our Father” sixteen times in a beautiful cursive—a style of writing we would not learn until much later in third grade. “We can’t read script,” someone—maybe I—said. “Why didn’t you print?” someone demanded. It was I. Later—years later—I  cringed to recall my temerity. But apparently unfazed, Sister merely waved a hand and read aloud “Our Father Who art in heaven.” She had us repeat the line as we looked at the page she had so carefully prepared. She read it again. We said it again. And again until in a way we were reading cursive. Sister and we proceeded in this way through every line of what remains the only prayer I still say. 
 
Indelibly, Sister taught me to pray. And to read.
 
**
 
Missing Crichton
 
We co-starred in our 1962 high school production of The Admirable Crichton, a J.M. Barrie play with a plot as incredible if not as wildly popular as Peter Pan. As Ernest Woolley I opened the show: “I perceive by the tea cups, Crichton, that the great function is to take place here.” The narrative whispered to me, as we waited out a tech rehearsal, by the fellow playing Crichton was incredible in its own way: He told me about his interview with the admissions officer at a well-known liberal arts college. “He asked me if I was homosexual!” I was shocked… that he had been asked yes, but shocked also by a word rarely uttered within my circle—even the drama club circle—in those days. And so I failed to ask Crichton what would today seem natural: And what did you say? Because I didn’t want to know? No. Because I was afraid he might say yes? Maybe. Because if he did say yes, I might have felt compelled to say Me too! or, worse, nothing. So self-absorbed, fearful, and closeted was I then that it has taken me decades to realize that Crichton likely wanted me to ask what he had told the officer because he suspected our answers would have been the same.
 
**

Expat New Yorker James Penha  (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Twitter: @JamesPenha