Liturgy of Next Door
/John Linstrom
I remember when everything mystical
was connected. The dark repeating tuh-thump
of car tires on the highway at night,
the way they changed their rhythm nearing home,
related to the raucous thumps of warped old pews
as grown-ups stood before the gospel, or
the random pops and clicks I’d hear, sitting
weekdays in the empty church, between
notes, practicing for lessons on the old upright
Everett piano. When the power went out
in the parsonage, the old clay kerosene lamp,
suddenly ennobled beyond decoration, lit
the dining room, the wide cloth wick so slowly
consumed, and that fire entubed in glass
might have been the same eternal flame
that lived in red glass hanging left
of the altar next door. My dad explained
that when that candle got too low, the new
was lit with the old one’s flame, so that’s how
it could be eternal. I asked, what if when they’re changing
there’s a breeze? Someone left the window
cracked? That, he said, and smiled, also
happens. It’s just a candle, John.
Sometimes, sitting on a rotty log, the wind
would come from over the church parking lot
down the chilly mud of the ravine, and toss
my hair, and might remind me of the candle
in the red glass tube, or the fluty music
of the Shadowfax cassette we played at night, or the weight
and lightness of the history when I first walked around
the columned, busted, marbled university library
in another town. I didn’t name the chill
I’d feel at times, my momma rocking
in the living room chair, my eyes closed, sick,
or poppa typing in his office next door, up the stairs,
stacks of papers leaning silent every step;
I only knew it had to do with darkness
and repeating beats, with something coming home.
Author’s Note: I wrote the initial draft of "Liturgy of Next Door" in my journal, sitting in one of the choir pews in the chancel of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Manhattan's Upper West Side. I was there with my fellow Space Poets, a group of friends who get together to inhabit different spaces around the city to see what poems come from the experiences we share in them. I had sat in those choir pews at the front of the church a couple years before, as a singer in the choir for a service marking the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, but as I sat there my thoughts began to wander to earlier memories. The gorgeous woodwork in that cathedral's chancel, the way the light came in through the stained glass windows far above the nave, and especially the massive iron lamps hanging from the ceiling, inspired a hushed sort of awe that took me back to the small Lutheran parish in the small town where I grew up in southwest Michigan and where my father served as pastor during my childhood. I love liturgy, the combination of architecture, art, music, poetry, and sometimes even dance and incense, that together create a traditional worship service. I don't know any other experience like it in terms of incorporating all of the arts into lived experience. And those hanging lamps in the cathedral reminded me of the candle in the little red glass tube that hung from the ceiling of my childhood church, known as the eternal flame or sanctuary lamp, which so intrigued me as a child. I wanted also to communicate the way in which liturgy travels beyond the bounds of a worship space, linking my experience of the eternal flame to the seldom-used clay kerosene lamp at home growing up and to thoughts and experiences I would have just out and about, exploring the ravine behind my house, for instance. As a singer and a poet, I tend to hear and feel music, rhythm, and pattern all over the place, around me and inside me, and there is something mysterious and sacred—and also childlike, I think—about those continuous, unexpected irruptions of beauty.
John Linstrom's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, The New Criterion, Atlanta Review, Commonweal Magazine, and Cold Mountain Review. He is series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press, coeditor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion (Comstock-Cornell UP, 2019), and editor of the centennial edition of Bailey's The Holy Earth (Counterpoint, 2015), which features a foreword by Wendell Berry. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. He currently lives with his wife and their joyful window garden in Queens, NY, where he is a MacCracken Fellow in English and American Literature at New York University.
