Long after Lauds: Poems

By Jeanine Hathaway

Ever since the Middle Ages, the first hour of daily prayer in monastic life--Matins--has roused the community from sleep. Wisely, the second hour was reserved for Lauds, which means praise. Praise with that freshly awakened consciousness. In this way, such an attitude toward the world, seen and unseen, could be absorbed before breakfast.

The poems in this book continue that tradition--though outside a monastic community--of waking up, reflecting, and discerning what there is to praise--and how, and whom. The book constructs an introspective retrospective of a woman charged with curiosity and accommodating doubt. Over decades, she acknowledges with gratitude her own daily shaping by students, grandchildren, rhinos--a public and private history full of saints and ain'ts.

Beyond the author's erstwhile community chanting Lauds, she explores its resonance with wit and wistfulness and arrives at this truth: praise over time alters the one who gives it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Slant Books
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781639820238

Jeanine Hathaway

Jeanine Hathaway currently enjoys professor emerita status from Wichita State University, where she has taught writing and literature. She was a poetry mentor in Seattle Pacific University's MFA Program. Hathaway is the author of the autobiographical novel Motherhouse (1992), the 2001 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize-winning The Self as Constellation (2002), and a chapbook, The Ex-Nun Poems (2011).

Book preview

DISAPPOINTMENTS

The gruff curator expects more of us, a tide

of schoolkids maybe after a long ride, bus rowdy,

to his makeshift sea lab, tanks cleaned. Terms

on the white-board wall color the language

of mollusk, cephalopod, sea star, anemone.

Only two of us show up, ambling along the beach,

our glasses smeared by sea spray and drizzle.

The man, heavy, bewhiskered Navy vet, bad back,

decides to withhold more than he’ll teach. Go on.

We’re free, hands on, to poke inside the tubs.

Your fingertip sinks down a sea star’s arm;

tube feet feel their wet way up to the foodless air.

My fingertip nettles an anemone, pink petaled

succulent, friction in the barbs. Stinging

nematocysts, they poison inedible me.

The curator from his stool across the lab grunts.

I head for the sink, touch nothing but soap and

scrub. All he’ll hear from here on: a woman

his age washing, not clapping, not the brilliant

applause he’d spent the morning setting up for.

ICHTHYOLOGY

Hacked and sliced, a pile of salmon halves

rots in the parking lot at the river’s mouth.

Orange and silver dinner for crows, part

installation, the Coho stare into tires, truck

bumpers. I stare into them: their bones

fallen combs, tails feathery, curling to

clumps. Flies swarm; the buzz is glued

to the asphalt. Not swimming, no flop or

fight—the meat’s gone out of the argument.

I shovel them back into the river.

Let whitewater tear them apart. Make private

the shame of this flaying, pick them clean,

inarticulate. A spiny silence lies below a hook.

Let even their bones be as useful as prayer,

those fine lines that some would call the catch.

BEFORE ENTERING

–5–6–7–8, and 1– The dancers drum onstage

from the wings where they were before the downbeat,

that pre-historic moment, bandaged and flinching,

calloused, split, grinning—the tick-swish of soles

on bare wood; their presence shifts how light leaps

off the watch of the ex-nun’s date. Such sound

bodies. Their backs, extraordinary overlaps

of muscle bound to bone. Contract/release,

land masses, ice floes break up, tectonics.

India ramming Asia there, under the scapula,

Himalayan scapula where legend says Doubting

Thomas spread the Gospel, a martyr in the shadow

of Everest or these wing-boned backs. It is

good news, the teaching: The dance does not begin

on the downbeat. You’re already dancing

on the –5–6–7–8, and–

you enter with history. Getting comfortable,

the ex-nun tilts her chin, lowers her shoulders

barely covered by rose silk,

once covered by a white wool scapular, that

strip of habit worn between gown and cape.

Her hands flat under it, thumbs tucked

into her belt. Her body still, if nothing more,

her presentation inspired by—what?—a long

tradition of women, given. Diamonds now

at her ears and throat, hands, ungloved yet

folded. She understands medieval Eckhart’s prayer

that God should rid him of God, as she could not at 25,

longing never to lose the idolatry, feeling it go:

the cloak; the headgear of wimple and guimpe;

veil, cape, tunic; sensible grandmother shoes.

She wonders: How could she or anyone dance and not

enter with history? How does gravity, the law of the present,

perfect