A Convergence Of Birds by Jonathon Safran Foer Read Free Book Online

time: in a poem, in the week
    I walked these syllables across the lake, thinking my bleak
    mood was just winter, even the lines I thought would carry going slack:
    I kept saying them faster, trying to revive them. Breath
    was feathering my fingers
    Joseph Cornell
    UNTITLED {COCKATOO FOR HOLDERLIN}
    c. 1954
    16.25 x 10.125 x 3.75 in.
    box construction

BOXED IN
    Paul West
    FATHER GARNET SHRINKS from the renaissance outside his bolthole, not because he trickles and gurgles with sudden eruptive swaggers of his tripes, but because the huge polity out there bellows Death To Jesuits, as if any one label sufficed to evince this polymath, baritone singer, adroit mellow speaker, earthy Derbyshireman still close to the loam that bore him, his little knotted soul all chirps and cheeps, weary of going on being careful even as he reminds himself that memory is the pasture, the greensward, on which the mind can disport itself most ably, molding everything to the shape of heart’s desire. On a sailor’s grave, he recalls, no flowers bloom. He wonders where he heard that, and why, able here to summon all his mental moutons into one flock, baa-ing the gospel according to Saint Garnet, that not too gaudy, too precious, stone. Doomed to practice it day after day, even to the extent of dipping his nib in orange juice to make the words invisible, he has fallen in love with secrecy.
    Once again he hears the noise of himself, squirreled away here in a priest hole made by a maimed dwarf of a carpenter who also happens to be a lay brother. Saved by woodwork, and a little tampering with the original masonry, Garnet languishes in the bosom of a vast country house—or rather in a thimble carved within a nipple—waiting for daylight, unable even to stand in the space allotted him. Why, he moans, are we hated so? He sneezes, once, twice, pressing his nose hard to quell the seizure, each time murmuring the time-honored formula, Bless you, that saves the soul from being flung far away, angelic silver skein aloft amid the tawdry of this world, never to return. You could sneeze yourself soulless. But he never will, although strictly speaking someone other than you should babble the housekeeping, nose-saving formula. Dieu vous aide, he knows, is what the soul-saving French neighbor says, automatic in this as in almost every other prayer. It is good, he reassures himself, to be prayed for in this way by just about anyone standing nearby. So, what does the King do when he sneezes? Bless himself or have a chorus of courtiers mumble the phrase? That is what they are there for, to keep his soul in his body in the interests of, well, not the one and only church, but his sect anyway. Father Garnet thinks that for the soul to speak it should have a language of its own, pure and godly, unknown to humankind and therefore blessing itself in blindest esoterica. Now, there’s just the kind of phrase to get him damned, socially at least, hoicked out of his hidey-hole and hanged along with hundreds of other mildly dissenting churls. Father Garnet has no room in which to shrug, but his mind makes the motion for him.
    This carpenter troubles him, this builder of hiding holes. He, Garnet, prefers the old-fashioned country word joiner. Little John Owen, the joiner in question, makes a fetish of joining priests to their mouseholes, almost as if he thinks of the priesthood as a furtive, shy calling: nothing of titles and fancy robes, but the essential spirit hidden within the rind of the planet, within all these lavish country houses. Hide-and-seek is not far from it, not when daily or even nightly life can be shattered at any hour by the arrival of priest-hunting poursuivants armed with torches and dogs, probes and huge cones of bark through which they listen to the masonry, the chimneys, the passageways. Garnet chides himself for thinking ill of his savior, but sticks to his point nonetheless: hiding us away as he does, and making endless provision for ever more of us all