At the Moment

At the Moment: While listening to John Coltrane’s “Moments Notice” on NPR Michael S. Harper (bio) Cave Canem: A Special Section Cave Canem Meditation, June 29, 1998, for WWH* There is hurt and no balm gilead for Saint Jude is my patron saint the room I was given at monastery retreat in Esopus, New York so I conjured Sean Connery in Chicago Untouchable on his belly in blood gasping for his medal which he hoped would protect him The view from Saint Jude’s window of the Hudson River is just south of my father’s birthplace and dayboats collapse and carouse in the shallows and deeps of this polluted artery to and from salt water in the Dutch waterways of the new world which was never new to the Esopus: Josephus Long’s little bug on 9 W to Esopus in the mainline to New Paltz and his staggered classes on Wiltwyck’s schedule of drugged and manacled boys with a 600 school and volunteer Mennonites [End Page 977] all any boy needs when homeless abandoned abused anointed in herring runs on the runaway trail to steep medications team meetings and records of shrink and case worker three at a time batteries in the arsenal of a schedule so you can get back to the apple whose eye is family missing in action not about to be found in any monastery except for Saint Jude every lost cause in the mercy side of the New Testament Michael S. Harper Michael S. Harper, the first Poet Laureate of Rhode Island (1988–1993), is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University. His most recent collection, Honorable Amendments (1995), won the George Kent Award selected by Gwendolyn Brooks. His collected poems Songlines in Michaeltree will be published in the spring of 2000. He is also co-editor (with Anthony Walton) of the Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, 1750–2000. He has edited or co-edited Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep (poetry), The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown and Chant of Saints. Footnotes * WWH is Walter Warren Harper, the poet’s father, who celebrated his 83rd birthday on June 29, 1998. Copyright © 2000 Charles H. Rowell

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