...Which Passeth Understanding

Poems should stand by themselves but in this case, a bit of explanation is required. I wrote this in 1999, four years after my college roommate and friend Steve O'Donnell died from AIDS. I was privileged to stay up with him on his last night on earth; I miss him, still, very much. 

The title is borrowed three times over: first, yes, from Paul's epistle to the Philippians 4:7; second, from the name Augustus Saint-Gaudens gave to the sculpture he made for Henry Adams' wife Clover's grave site in Washington DC, depicted below -- Saint-Gaudens, who not incidentally also sculpted the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common that Lowell of course memorialized in turn -- called it "The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding" but most people call it "Grief" although not Adams, who wanted it to represent nirvana, or Guanyin, the goddess of compassion; and third the gloss that T.S. Eliot wrote for the last line in "The Wasteland," where he footnotes "Shantih Shantih Shantih" with "Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word." A lot to put into three words, and I'm afraid the reference to the ineffable mystery of god's intentions is meant with anger and irony, even now.


The poem itself is a fabrication, a made thing, but does borrow from two true things: a put-in for the undergraduate production of "Mother Courage" where Steve was set designer and I was borrowed help and we did finish at dawn and walk home; and various trips to the upper floors of the Harvard Science Center in the middle of the night, for parties, tossing paper airplanes, and other moments of genteel undergraduate mayhem.


Finally, yes, it's a formal sonnet, iambic pentameter, coda and all. It seemed like the best way to contain what it contains.

Source: Alice Lora

...Which Passeth Understanding

The dead are easier to speak with than
the living. Politely silent, unperturbed
by fictions draped over their past -- disturbed
they settle back like dust where dust began.
We talk more often than we did before --
you’d think four years would be enough to shake
this sense, this presence only absence makes.
I lie awake and say this to the door.

Another all-night put-in left us outside
the Loeb, cold in dawn’s ghost light. You said
let’s go up the Science Center. Sixteen years
ago. It’s time.  Out on the roof the sky
tipped up – as Mem Hall’s tower turned blood red
you raised your arms and made the sun appear.