All Saints Sunday
Today we remember our dead and turn back our clocks. Both are included in Dionisio D. Martinez’s “Standard Time: Novena for My Father,” a tender prayer poem directed to the speaker’s deceased father.
Early on, wind chimes remind the speaker of his parent, leading him to work “All Hallows Eve” and other names for the day into a little ditty. These thoughts of death lead him to Saint Francis, who in addition to welcoming birds embraced “Sister Death.” By not living in fear of death—this is what Martinez means by Francis “having nothing but faith in his hands”— Francis believed we could open ourselves fully to God.
Having sat all day with a statue of Francis, the poet no longer needs to hear the wind chimes to imagine his father as present. He thinks of Francis’s birds as dead souls (night birds), which
breathe music back into the wind chimes when
the forecast calls for stillness.
I must admit to difficulties with the next two stanzas, even though I love some of the imagery. Here they are:
I still remember what you said about belief,
how you laughed when I said I thought
the world could carry the cross I’d carved
around my shoulder and through my fist.
The world is busy with its clocks and its
wind chimes and the night birds that never fly
home once they learn the secret of exile.
Perhaps, thinking back to his disagreements with his father over belief, he now questions his need for tangible evidence. When he says, in the first of the stanzas, that the only thing he believed in was what he could carry on his shoulders and accomplish with his fist—he believed more in the crucifixion than the resurrection—his father laughed at him. Unlike the senior Martinez, the son doesn’t have St. Francis’s faith, which draws birds, not heavy world responsibilities, to his shoulders.
Similarly, if he is still obsessed with resetting clocks and finding signs of his father in wind chimes and imagined night birds, then he has yet to achieve the faith. But I’m still puzzled about what he means by “secret of exile,” even though I love the phrase. Is he saying that his father, once having flown to God, would not fly home again? And is the poet, having thought that he detected the presence of his father, now wondering if it just been an illusion? After all, why would a bird fly home after having discovered the secret of eternity?
The questioning takes me back to three successive Sundays after my eldest son died. Each time, as Julia and I stood atop the churchyard bluff looking down at where Justin had drowned, an osprey landed in the tree above us and stayed there until we left some twenty minutes later. It provided us comfort at a very dark time, a seeming sign from Justin, but I can understand Martinez’s doubts.
Incidentally, the 17th century metaphysical poet uses the same flown bird image to contrast the earthly and the spiritual in “They are all gone into the world of light”:
Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust
Could man outlook that mark!
He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know
At first sight, if the bird be flown;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.
Returning to Martinez’s poem, in the next stanza he emits an “almost musical sigh” after lighting a votive candle. If we have no other contact, maybe you can at least hear this, the poet says to his father. Then he launches unexpectedly into hell imagery.
Perhaps “all the souls in hell” represent materialist doubt in the divine—that’s partly what hell is for Dante—because Martinez indicates the weapons these souls use to plunge us into hell (“set the world on fire”) are mathematics and equations. Despite their efforts, however, they cannot prevail over the way we “cling to the last flame in the equation.” That flame could be both the candle Martinez lights before his father’s picture or and the Pentecostal flame, where the Holy Spirit entered us after Jesus departed the world.
In other words, when we lose a loved one and all the world is dark, when we doubt an afterlife because it makes no rational sense, some small flame of hope persists. Its ability to override our doubts is all the more impressive.
Standard Time: Novena for My Father
By Dionisio D. Martinez
We’re turning back the clocks tonight
to live an hour longer.
I suppose this is a useless ritual to you now.
Late October brings life to the wind chimes
with that perpetually nocturnal music
so reminiscent of you.
I memorize a small song, a seasonable dirge
for the night that lives outside my
window. I call each note by name:
All Hallows Eve; All Saints Day; all the souls
in my music pacing, talking to themselves.
All day I sit by the statue of Saint
Francis of Assisi, birds on his shoulders,
nothing but faith in his hands.
At dusk I return to the house you knew
and a life you would probably understand.
There are night birds waiting to
breathe music back into the wind chimes when
the forecast calls for stillness.
I still remember what you said about belief,
how you laughed when I said I thought
the world could carry the cross I’d carved
around my shoulder and through my fist.
The world is busy with its clocks and its
wind chimes and the night birds that never fly
home once they learn the secret of exile.
I let out one sigh that is almost musical.
I know you can hear this much.
I take a small step back and picture
you here before I light the last candle.
All the souls in hell couldn’t set this world
on fire. Even if they prove that our lives
are mathematically impossible, we
will cling to the last flame in the equation.
