Priestdaddy: A Memoir

by Patricia Lockwood

This, then, is home. What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place? Is it the intersection of rigidity and comfort—a junction of familiarity that you curl into? Is it a feeling? I don’t know, but I’m being hugged hard against it, and I can’t tell when I’ll be let go.

“Why do they do it? Why would anybody want to do it? Why?” I shrug. Since the age of six, I have been a poet. “When you’re called, you’re called.”

to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it.

Here are the glasses through which the eyes scan the numbers, how much it is worth, how much must be paid out. Here is the compassion in the face, that flowed toward the sinner and never the sinned-against, that forgave before justice had even been meted out.

Usually publishing a poem is like puking in space, or growing an adolescent mustache—no one really notices, and it might be better that way.

A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.

Love

The high dive meant leaping off the edge of a moment and trusting the next one would catch you.

the baby with its skull shaped like a lightbulb, like an idea the world is about to get.

when the fresh scroll is handed to you, and speed is put back into your heels, and your body re-remembers the straight line, the happiness cannot be described—not in the new book or any other. The feeling is arrowness, nothing else. Hit the apple or split the head, you are happy, you are straight ahead, you are flying.

And how does the good news arrive? It does not arrive in your ears, exactly; it arrives in your face as a great gush of light. It is carried to you, not like a rose but like the symbol of a rose, straight into your understanding. There is no sound. It happens in your bedroom, or in your cave in the middle of the desert, with a lion’s head spreading on your lap, or on top of the pillar where you’ve sat for a hot century. It happens in your study, wherever that happens to be.

You get a gift on Easter too—a trash can that looks like a tree, to throw all your sins into.

“He had come to the stage when one realizes how difficult playing is going to be, but one cannot go back and not be musical, that is how one hears things and there is no help for it.” Rebecca West said that.

“You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.” Rebecca West said that. You must also believe that it is as high, and as low, as strained to the breaking, and that the silence before and after it is as sweet.

A cat is a kind of externalized thinking, another intelligence in the house, which prowls.

hope he only ever heard the word “no” when it was good for him.

DEATH IS CLOSER TO CHURCHES, in both obvious and invisible ways. Death is in the pews every week and puts its dim money in the collection basket and walks out every Sunday with a different family on its arm, gallant and black-suited, opening the doors for them and ushering them through.

to surround him with the right adjectives and set him into the story—all this is an attempt to fit him in the glass box of a good sentence so everyone can see what he means. But it won’t work, the words can’t hold him, and I am glad. The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.

The word “God” does not fall out of the vocabulary, as the sun does not fall out of the sky; the shapes of the stories remain, as do their revelations.

To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother’s body and finally your own.

The word “monstrance” means “to show,” and when I read it, up rises that round image of the bread through the glass—bread that my own father has consecrated, at the climax of a metaphor that is more than a metaphor, at the moment where real time intersects with eternity. How to explain this moment to someone who never believed it, could never believe it? That bells ring, that the universe kneels, that what happened enters into the house of what is always happening, and sits with it together and eats at its table.