The only places I can find you, besides the acre outside Fargo where you lie with my mother, are the places you made: the dome you designed at twenty-four, the chapel on the right side of the Fifth Avenue altar, the vaulted ceiling of stars arranged for a night of revelation - the birth of Christ, the conversion of Saul. My atheist father, I come to your churches - sit with the dead in a dark pew - because alive I had no father under the dome in the chapel beneath the stars just a man corked into his booze bottle. Beneath your silent dome I puzzle the split that rived you like a lightning scar. Were you the man who thought Hitler right about the Jews or the one whose mind spun through Bach's ecstasy of fugal celebrations? But you were neither a good nor evil sorcerer - Gandalf nor Saruman - just the Wizard of Oz manipulating illusion behind a curtain. Under the vault of your stars, I hear you in the colorless despair of vodka raging against our common lot, "When I die, who will know I lived?" Immortality being man-made as the stained glass of Chartres that hues Mary blue out of glass, you are recalled from death by your stars to those who, anonymous in their devotions, have never forgotten you. Before your altar blazing with Byzantine colors, I watch worshipers kneel, praying before the beauty of your disbelief. Perhaps they would find in your paradox a proof for His presence - that it is the atheist who forms most faithfully the face of God. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE HURRICANE by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT THE FROGS: A 'EURIPIDEAN' CHORUS by ARISTOPHANES FRAGMENTS INTENDED FOR DEATH'S JEST-BOOK: MAN'S GUARD AGAINST DEATH by THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES LYING IN GRASS by MELVILLE CANE |