Great Cathedrals

I love Christmas card photos and newsletters. I love the conventions, the traditional poses, and also the people who send or show me the outtake photos! In the last few years I've been fascinated with holiday photos taken in France, so often posed in front of the Eiffel tower. In reaction, I felt compelled to choose a photo of my family in front of the red carpet entrance to the movie awards auditorium in Cannes. Here's one I took in front of Chartres; I wanted a pose with the scaffolding, because we thought it would be good for our claim that we were there for the rebuilding after the demolition of the cathedral at Chartres.

I also love reading poems by George Bilgere because he's funny, thoughtful, and once had the good taste to give an award to a poem written by my daughter. Here's one of his poems that had me laughing out loud, Great Cathedrals:

Before a date, my college roommate
Used to drive his candy-apple red Camaro
Down to the car wash and spend the afternoon
Washing, waxing, vacuuming it,
Detailing the chrome strips, buffing the fenders,
Spraying the big expensive tires
With their raised white lettering

That said something like Intruder
or Marauder, with a silicone spray
Until they were slick and dark as sex.
He polished that car as if each caress,
Each pass of the chamois, each loving
Stroke of the terry cloth would increase,

By measurable degrees,
The likelihood that in the immaculate
Front seat, with its film of freshly applied
Vinyl cleaner, at the end of a cul-de-sac
Somewhere above the campus,
She would consent to be rubbed
And buffed just as lovingly.

We do what we can,
And if God is no more impressed
By the cathedral at Chartres
Than by a righteously clean and cherry
Camaro, at least He can't say
We haven't tried
With all our might to conceal our fear
That we have little else to offer
Than stained glass or polished chrome,
The elbow grease of our good intentions.

So I'm happy to see
That in the Christmas card photo he sent
Mark stands, balding now,
With a dignified gut, a pretty wife,
And a couple of nice-looking kids, in front
Of the great cathedral
Like the sweet vision of a future
He'd been vouchsafed one day
Long ago, through Turtle Wax
On a gleaming hubcap.

Here's to all of you, that your families may appreciate at least the elbow grease of your good intentions this holiday season!

What Might Have Been

Thinking about what might have been in Jane Eyre (and Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Gone With the Wind, and The Golden Compass) last week made me like George Bilgere's poem "Casablanca" even better this week:

Last night I saw Casablanca again,
following it like an old song
as it touched on all the familiar notes
of passion, betrayal, and death,

sweeping me along as helplessly
and willingly as it did the first time.

Once more I lamented
the lovers' lost idyll in Paris,
once more I sweated out with them
the approaching thunder of the Occupation,

and once more I felt the sweet relief
as the Nazis arrived at the airport
a split-second too late

to stop Bergman and Bogart
from climbing aboard the shining airplane
and rising toward freedom in a driving rain.

It's the same feeling I have every time
I come to the end of Othello,
when the Moor listens to Iago's
outrageous insinuations in utter disbelief
before having him whipped and imprisoned for life,

and then embarking with Desdemona
on a honeymoon cruise through the Aegean.

Or when, in the final, grainy frames,
the handsome young President in the open car
kisses Jackie with unabashed vigor,

and all the spectators on the grassy knoll
put down their cameras for a moment
and burst into spontaneous applause
as the limo returns triumphant to the airport.

It's like that giddy feeling I had,
that sense of having stepped from a cave
into a bright meadow full of flowers,
when the doctors announced
that the looming gray mass on my mother's spine
had turned out to be nothing more
than a harmless flyspeck on the negative,

a feeling of pure, high-octane joy
of the sort I haven't experienced
since the day my wife came back to me in tears,

begging me to forgive her
for even considering the possibility
of leaving me. And of course I forgave her,

and held her for a long time
before taking her out to Mario's,
where we like to go on Friday night,

and the waiter brought us to our usual table
and the evening ended as evenings do

when there's been a little too much wine,
and the woman is very beautiful
and a sudden rain makes everything shine.

I especially like how the speaker's regret for his wife is the culmination of the poem, because in so many of the other poems in the volume (Haywire), there's a bitter, cynical attitude about why she left and how useless it is to wish for a different outcome to the marriage.

And yet, I still wish. Do you? Wouldn't you, just once, like to see the young couple at the door of the Frankenstein castle in the middle of the night look at each other and say "why are we about to knock on the door of this creepy place? Let's go." Wouldn't you like to see Romeo mourn for just a few more minutes? Wouldn't it be nice to see Mayella and Arthur find each other and live happily ever after, not even noticing how Tom Robinson lives his life down the road? Well, okay. In Mary Poppins' terminology "Maybe that's going a bit too far" (in the movie Bert replies "Indubitably").

Is it only tragedies that make us long for what might have been? Have you ever turned a story over and over in your mind searching for a way out?